Death House Landlady: Dorothea Puente

 

Dorothea Helen Puente (née Gray; January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks. Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. Newspapers dubbed Puente the "Death House Landlady".

Background

Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (née Yates) and Jesse James Gray. She had a traumatic upbringing; her parents were both alcoholics and her father repeatedly threatened to commit suicide in front of his children. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1937; her mother lost custody of her children in 1938 and died in a motorcycle accident by the end of the year. Puente and her siblings were subsequently sent to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused.

Gray's first marriage, at the age of sixteen, in 1945, was to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of World War II. Gray had two daughters between 1946 and 1948; she sent one child to live with relatives in Sacramento and placed the other for adoption. McFaul left her in late 1948, after she suffered a miscarriage.

In the spring of 1948, Gray was arrested for purchasing women's accessories using forged checks in Riverside. She was charged and pled guilty to two counts of forgery, serving four months in jail and three years' probation. Six months after her release, she left Riverside.

In 1952, Gray married merchant seaman Axel Bren Johansson in San Francisco. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", and claiming to be a Muslim of Egyptian and Israeli descent. They had a turbulent marriage; Gray would take advantage of Johansson's frequent trips to sea by inviting men to their home and gambling away his money.

Gray was arrested in 1960 for owning and operating a brothel under the disguise of a bookkeeping firm in Sacramento; she was found guilty and was sentenced to ninety days in the Sacramento County Jail. In 1961, Johansson had Gray briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital after a binge of drinking, lying, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. While there, doctors diagnosed her as a pathological liar with an unstable personality.

Gray and Johansson divorced in 1966, although she would continue to use Johansson's name for some time following their separation. Gray assumed the identity of "Sharon Johansson", hiding her delinquent behavior by portraying herself as a kind, Christian woman. She established her reputation as a caregiver, providing young women with a sanctuary from poverty and abuse without charge.

In 1968, Gray married Roberto Jose Puente. After sixteen months, the couple separated, with Gray citing domestic abuse as the main cause. In 1967, she attempted to serve him with a divorce petition, but Puente fled to Mexico; the divorce wouldn't be finalized until 1973. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order against him in 1975. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years.

Following her divorce, Gray would focus on running a boarding house located at 21st and F streets in Sacramento. She established herself as a genuine resource to the community to aid alcoholics, homeless people, and mentally ill people by holding Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and assisting individuals to sign up to receive Social Security benefits. She changed her public image to that of a respectable older matron by putting on vintage clothing, wearing large granny glasses, and letting her hair turn gray. She also established herself as a respected member in Sacramento's Hispanic community, funding charities, scholarships, and radio programs. She eventually met and married Pedro Angel Montalvo, though Montalvo abruptly left the relationship only a week after their marriage.

In 1978, Gray was charged and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four state and federal checks that belonged to her tenants. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution.

Murders

In April 1982, 53-year-old Ruth Munroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment, but soon died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. Puente told police that the woman was very depressed because her husband was terminally ill. They believed her and ruled the death as a suicide.

A few weeks later, the police returned after Malcolm McKenzie, a 74-year-old pensioner (one of four elderly people Puente was accused of drugging), accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him.[citation needed] On August 18, 1982, Puente was convicted of three theft charges and sentenced to five years in prison; there, she began corresponding with Everson Gillmouth, a 77-year-old retiree from Oregon. A pen pal friendship developed, and when Puente was released in 1985 after serving three years of her five-year sentence, he met her outside the prison, driving a red 1980 Ford pickup. Their relationship developed quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans.

In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. For his labor and $800, Puente gave him the red Ford pickup, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles, who no longer needed it. She asked Florez to build a 6-by-3-by-2-foot box to store "books and other items". She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him.

Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. On January 1, 1986, a fisherman spotted the suspicious looking coffin-like box near the river and called police. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. Puente continued to collect Gillmouth's pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason he had not contacted them was because he was ill. She continued to maintain a boarding house, taking in forty new tenants. Gillmouth's body remained unidentified for three years.

Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". During this period, parole agents visited Puente at least fifteen times; though she had been ordered to keep away from the elderly and refrain from handling government checks, no violations were ever noted.

Suspicion was first aroused when neighbors noticed the odd activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as "Chief", whom Puente stated she had "adopted" and hired as her handyman. Puente had Chief dig in the basement and cart soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Chief later dismantled a garage in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. Soon afterward, Chief disappeared.

Arrest and imprisonment

On November 11, 1988, police inquired after the disappearance of tenant Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with schizophrenia, who had been reported missing by his social worker. After noticing disturbed soil on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona Carpenter, 78. Seven bodies were eventually found buried on the property.

Puente was charged with a total of nine murders: Puente's boyfriend, Everson Gillmouth, 77; and eight tenants who lived at the boarding house: Ruth Munroe, 61; Leona Carpenter, 78; Alvaro "Bert/Alberto" Gonzales Montoya, 51; Dorothy Miller, 64; Benjamin Fink, 55; James Gallop, 62; Vera Faye Martin, 64; and Betty Palmer, 78. According to investigators, most of her victims had been drugged until they overdosed; Puente then wrapped them in bed-sheets and plastic lining before dragging them to open pits in the backyard for burial.

During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately a suspect, and she was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee at a nearby hotel. Instead, after buying the coffee, she fled immediately to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly male pensioner whom she had met in a bar. Unbeknownst to Puente, the pensioner recognized her as the woman he saw on television news reports. The pensioner contacted local law enforcement who then quickly arrested Puente.

Granting a change of venue motion filed by Puente's lawyers, Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin III, a judge transferred the trial to Monterey County. Trial began in October 1992 and ended a year later. The prosecutor, John O'Mara, was the homicide supervisor in the Sacramento County District Attorney's office.

O'Mara called over 130 witnesses; he argued to the jury that Puente had used sleeping pills to put her tenants to sleep, then suffocated them, and hired convicts to dig the holes in her yard. Clymo concluded his closing argument by showing a picture commonly used in psychology that can be viewed in different ways and saying "Keep in mind things are not always as they seem." The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. The jury was deadlocked eleven to one for conviction on all counts, and the lone holdout finally agreed to a conviction of two first-degree murder counts, including special circumstances, and one second-degree murder count. The penalty phase of the prosecution was highlighted by her prior convictions introduced by O'Mara.

The defense called several witnesses, who showed Puente had a generous and caring side to her. Witnesses, including her long-lost daughter, testified how Puente had helped them in their youth and guided them to successful careers. Mental health experts testified of Puente's abusive upbringing and how it motivated her to help the less fortunate. At the same time, they agreed she had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out tenants.

O'Mara's closing argument focused on Puente's acts of murder:

Does anyone become responsible for their conduct in this world? ... These people were human beings, they had a right to live-they did not have a lot of possessions-no houses-no cars-only their social security checks and their lives. She took it all... Death is the only appropriate penalty.

Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and caregiver. Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones, contrasting with O'Mara's shouting:

We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value of Dorothea Puente's life? That is the question. Does she have to be killed?" Vlautin spoke gently about Puente's childhood touching on the traumatic aspects that shaped her life and urged the jurors to see the world through her eyes. "You have heard of the despair which was the foundation of her life, the anger and resentment...If anyone in the jury room tells you it was not that bad, ask them would you want that to happen to yourself? Would you want that to happen to your children? ... I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be living here on this Earth, it is to somehow enhance one another's humanity, to love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one person breathe easier because you have lived. I submit to you ladies and gentlemen that is why these people came to testify for Dorothea Puente ... I think you can only truly understand why so many people testified and asked you to spare Dorothea's life only if you have ever fallen down and stumbled on the road of life and had someone pick you up, give you comfort, give you love, show you the way. Then you will understand why these people believe Dorothea's life is worth saving. That is mitigating. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. It is a flame of humanity that has burned inside Dorothea since she was young ... That is reason to give Dorothea Puente life without the possibility of parole.

Conviction

Puente was convicted of three of the murders, although the jury could not agree on the other six. After several days of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked 7–5; Judge Michael J. Virga declared a mistrial when the jury said further deliberations would not change their minds. Under the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. She was incarcerated at Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes".

Death

Puente died in prison at Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, from natural causes; she was 82.

Media

Puente has been featured on numerous true crime television shows, including Crime Stories, Deadly Women, A Stranger in My Home, World's Most Evil Killers, and Worst Roommate Ever

The 1991 film Evil Spirits, starring Karen Black and Arte Johnson, is loosely based on the Puente murders.

In 1998, Puente began corresponding with Shane Bugbee. The result was Cooking with a Serial Killer (2004), which included a lengthy interview, almost fifty recipes, and various pieces of prison art sent to Bugbee by the convicted murderer. Jodi Picoult mentions Puente's crimes and cookbook in her novel House Rules.

The boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento was included in the 2013 home tour held by the Sacramento Old City Association. It was then the subject of the 2015 documentary short The House Is Innocent and was again opened to tours for one day in conjunction with a local film festival's showing of the film.

In 2015, the Ghost Adventures crew investigated the house, due to reports of hauntings by the victims and Puente herself.

In April 2020, the house and current owners were showcased in the Quibi series Murder House Flip.

In June 2020, the house was featured in a ten-minute documentary with 60 Second Docs about the purchase and renovation of the house by the current owners.

In March 2022, the case was featured in episode one of the Netflix true crime series Worst Roommate Ever.

Joseph Yablonski Family Murder

 

Joseph Albert "Jock" Yablonski (March 3, 1910 – December 31, 1969) was an American labor leader in the United Mine Workers in the 1950s and 1960s known for seeking reform in the union and better working conditions for miners. In 1969 he challenged Tony Boyle for the presidency of the international union and was defeated. He asked for a Department of Labor (DOL) investigation, charging a fraudulent election. In addition, Yablonski filed suit against the UMWA on five different charges related to fraud. On New Year's Eve, Yablonski, his wife and 25-year-old daughter were murdered, fatally shot at home by three gunmen found to have been hired on orders of Tony Boyle.

A total of seven persons were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder; two of the assassins were sentenced to death for first-degree murder. DOL completed its investigation, aided by the FBI, and won a suit to overturn the 1969 election by 1972. A new election was held in December of that year and a reform candidate elected, defeating Boyle. Boyle was indicted in 1973 for the three Yablonski murders; he was convicted in 1974 and received three life sentences. The union made important reforms.

Early life, marriages and union career

Joseph Yablonski, called "Jock", was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on March 3, 1910, as the son of Polish immigrants, After attending public schools, Yablonski began working in the mines as a boy, joining his father in this industry.

After his father was killed in a mine explosion, Yablonski became active in the United Mine Workers and began to advocate for better working conditions. He was first elected to union office in 1934. In 1940, Yablonski was elected as a representative to the international executive board. In 1958 he was appointed president of UMW District 5.

As a young man, Yablonski married Ann Marie Huffman (November 5, 1913 – September 28, 2003). Their son Kenneth J. Yablonski was born in 1934. Yablonski married again, to Margaret Rita Wasicek (August 8, 1912 – December 31, 1969), an amateur playwright. They had two children, Joseph "Chip" (b. 1941) and Charlotte Yablonski, b. 1944. Both sons became labor attorneys, representing their father in his union activities and later in private practices. Charlotte became a social worker in Clarksville, Pennsylvania, where her family lived. She took leave to work in 1969 on her father's campaign for the UMWA presidency.

Yablonski clashed with Tony Boyle, who was elected president of the UMW in 1963, over how the union should be run. He believed that Boyle did not adequately represent the miners and was too cozy with the mine owners. In 1965, Boyle removed Yablonski as president of District 5 (under changes enacted by Boyle, district presidents were appointed by him, rather than being elected by union members of their district, giving him more control.

In May 1969, Yablonski announced his candidacy for president of the union in the election to be held later that year. As early as June, Boyle was reportedly discussing the need to kill his opponent.

UMWA presidential candidacy

The United Mine Workers was in turmoil by 1969. Legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis had retired in 1960. His successor, Thomas Kennedy, died in 1963. From retirement, Lewis hand-picked Boyle for the UMWA presidency. A Montana miner, Boyle was as autocratic and bullying as Lewis, but not as well liked.

From the beginning of his administration, Boyle faced significant opposition from rank-and-file miners and UMWA leaders. Miners' attitudes about their union had also changed. Miners wanted greater democracy and more autonomy for their local unions. There was also a widespread belief that Boyle was more concerned with protecting mine owners' interests than those of his members. Grievances filed by the union often took months—sometimes years—to resolve, lending credence to the critics' claim. Wildcat strikes occurred as local unions, despairing of UMWA assistance, sought to resolve local disputes with walkouts.

In 1969, Yablonski challenged Boyle for the presidency of UMWA. He was the first anti-administration insurgent candidate in 40 years. In an election widely seen as corrupt, Boyle beat Yablonski in the election held on December 9, by a margin of nearly two-to-one (80,577 to 46,073). Yablonski conceded the election.

On December 18, 1969, he asked the United States Department of Labor (DOL) to investigate the election for fraud. He also initiated five civil lawsuits against UMWA in federal court, on related matters. He alleged that: Boyle and UMWA had denied him use of the union's mailing lists as provided for by law, he had been removed from his position as acting director of Labor's Non-Partisan League in retaliation for his candidacy, the UMW Journal was being used by Boyle as a campaign and propaganda mouthpiece, UMWA had no rules for fair elections, and had printed nearly 51,000 excess ballots which should have been destroyed; and UMWA had violated its fiduciary duties by spending union funds on Boyle's reelection. These charges and their resolution are outlined in the civil case Kenneth J. Yablonski and Joseph A. Yablonski v. United Mine Workers of America et al., 466 F.2d 424 (August 3, 1972), which his sons carried to the end.

Murder

On December 31, 1969, three hitmen fatally shot Yablonski, his wife Margaret, and his 25-year-old daughter Charlotte, as they slept in the Yablonski home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies were discovered on January 5, 1970, by one of Yablonski's sons, Kenneth.

An investigation found that the killings had been ordered by Boyle, who had demanded Yablonski's death on June 23, 1969, after a meeting with Yablonski at UMWA headquarters degenerated into a shouting match. In September 1969, UMWA executive council member Albert Pass received $20,000 from Boyle (who had embezzled the money from union funds) to hire gunmen to kill Yablonski. He hired Paul Eugene Gilly (September 5, 1932 – July 6, 2021), an out-of-work house painter and son-in-law of Silous Huddleston, a minor UMWA official, and two drifters, Aubran Wayne “Buddy” Martin (May 7, 1948 – March 12, 1991) and Claude Edward Vealey (July 9, 1943 – January 31, 1999).

The murder was ordered postponed until after the election, however, to avoid suspicion falling on Boyle. After three aborted attempts to murder Yablonski, the killers completed the assassinations, deciding to kill everyone in the house. They left so many fingerprints behind that the police identified and captured them within three days.

A few hours after Yablonski's funeral, several of the miners who had supported Yablonski met in the basement of the church where the memorial service was held. They met with attorney Joseph Rauh and drew up plans to establish a reform caucus within the United Mine Workers.

The day after the bodies of the Yablonskis were discovered, 20,000 miners in West Virginia walked off the job in a one-day strike, protesting against Boyle, who they believed was responsible for the murders.

Aftermath of Yablonski's murder

On January 8, 1970, Yablonski's attorney waived the right to further internal review of the election by the union and requested an immediate investigation by DOL of the 1969 union presidential election. On January 17, 1972, the United States Supreme Court granted Mike Trbovich, a 51-year-old coal mine shuttle car operator and union member from District 5 (Yablonski's district), permission to intervene in the DOL suit as a complainant, which kept Yablonski's election fraud suit alive. Labor Secretary George P. Shultz assigned 230 investigators to the UMWA investigation and Attorney General Mitchell ordered the FBI to join the murder inquiry.

The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959 regulates the internal affairs of labor unions, requiring regular secret-ballot elections for local union offices and providing for federal investigation of election fraud or impropriety. DOL is authorized under the act to sue in federal court to have the election overturned. By 1970, however, only three international union elections had been overturned by the courts.

Gilly, Martin and Vealey were arrested days after the assassinations and indicted for Yablonski's death. All were convicted of first-degree murder. Gilly and Vealey were sentenced to death (the death sentences were later reduced to life in prison due to Furman v. Georgia); Martin avoided execution by pleading guilty and turning state's evidence.

Eventually, investigators arrested Paul Gilly's wife, Annette Lucy Gilly; her father Silous Huddleston; Albert Pass (who had given the money to pay the conspirators for murder) and Pass's wife. All were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, in trials extending into 1973. (Both Annette Gilly and her father Silous Huddleston pleaded guilty in 1972, receiving life sentences to avoid the death penalty.)

Miners for Democracy (MFD) formed in April 1970, while the DOL investigation of the 1969 election continued. Its members included most of the miners who belonged to the West Virginia Black Lung Association and many of Yablonski's supporters and former campaign staff. MFD's support was strongest in southwestern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and the panhandle and northern portions of West Virginia, but MFD supporters existed in nearly all affiliates. The chief organizers of Miners for Democracy included Yablonski's sons, Joseph (known as "Chip") and Ken, Mike Trbovich, and other union supporters.

DOL filed suit in federal court in 1971 to overturn the 1969 UMWA election. After several lengthy delays, the suit went to trial on September 12, 1971. On May 1, 1972, Judge William Bryant threw out the results of the 1969 UMWA international union elections.

Bryant scheduled a new election to be held during the first eight days of December 1972. In addition, Bryant agreed that DOL should oversee the election to ensure fairness.

On May 28, 1972, MFD nominated Arnold Miller, a miner from West Virginia who challenged Boyle for the presidency, based on the need for black lung legislation to protect the miners.

Balloting for the next UMWA president began on December 1, 1972. Balloting ended on December 9, and Miller was declared the victor on December 15. The Labor Department certified Miller as UMWA's next president on December 22. The vote was 70,373 for Miller and 56,334 for Boyle.

Two of the convicted murderers had accused Boyle of masterminding and funding the assassination plot. The murder investigation and confessions of other conspirators revealed the financial and other trails leading back to Boyle. In April 1973 Boyle was indicted on three counts of murder; he was convicted in April 1974. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison, where he died in 1985.

Honors and legacy

In 1973, Yablonski posthumously received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, made annually by Jefferson Awards.

In 1995, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker in California, Pennsylvania commemorating Yablonski's life and work.

Portrayal in popular culture

Barbara Kopple's 1976 documentary, Harlan County USA, included a segment on Yablonski's murder and its aftermath. It also includes the song "Cold Blooded Murder" (also known as "The Yablonski Murder"), sung by Hazel Dickens.

John Sayles's novel Union Dues (1977) is a fictional account of miners fighting for proper union representation in 1969. The Boyle-Yablonski dispute is a sub-plot which several characters mention, expressing their opinions of unions and corruption.

The 1986 HBO television movie, Act of Vengeance, was about the union struggle and the murders. Wilford Brimley played Boyle and Charles Bronson (a native of Ehrenfeld in the western Pennsylvania mining region) portrayed Yablonski.

William Joyce

 

William Brooke Joyce (24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946), nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was a fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War. A member of the British Union of Fascists from 1932, he fled to Germany at the outset of the war and took German citizenship in 1940.

Joyce was convicted of one count of high treason in 1945 and sentenced to death, with the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords both upholding his conviction. He was hanged on 3 January 1946, making him the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Early life

William Brooke Joyce was born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, United States. His father was Michael Francis Joyce (9 December 1866 – 19 February 1941), an Irish Catholic from a family of farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, who had taken U.S. citizenship on 25 October 1894. His mother was Gertrude Emily Brooke (1878–1944), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom, was from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of medical practitioners associated with County Roscommon.

A few years after William's birth, the family returned to Salthill, Galway, Ireland. Joyce attended Coláiste Iognáid, a Jesuit school in Galway, from 1915 to 1921. His parents were unionist and hostile to Irish nationalism, and his mother was strongly Anglocentric and devoutly Protestant. There were tensions between her and her family because she married a Catholic. Joyce's father bought houses, and rented some to the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Although Joyce was still only in his mid-teens, he was recruited during the Irish War for Independence by Captain Patrick William Keating as a courier for British Army intelligence in Galway, then fighting against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He was known to associate with Black and Tans at Lenaboy Castle, and was linked to the murder of Father Michael Griffin, a known Irish republican sympathizer, in 1920. Keating arranged for Joyce to be mustered into the Worcester Regiment soon after, taking him out of the dangerous situation in Ireland to Norton Barracks in England. He was discharged a few months later after it was found out he was underage.

Joyce remained in England and briefly attended King's College School, Wimbledon. His family followed him to England two years later. Joyce had relatives in Birkenhead, Cheshire, whom he visited on a few occasions. He then applied to Birkbeck College, London, where he entered the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck, he obtained a first-class honors degree in English. After graduating he applied for a job in the Foreign Office, but was rejected and took a job as a teacher. Joyce developed an interest in fascism and worked with, but never joined, the British Fascists of Rotha Lintorn-Orman.

On 22 October 1924, while stewarding a meeting in support of Conservative Party candidate Jack Lazarus ahead of the 1924 general election, Joyce was attacked by communists and received a deep razor slash across his right cheek. It left a permanent scar which ran from the earlobe to the corner of the mouth. While Joyce often said that his attackers were Jewish, historian Colin Holmes claims that Joyce's first wife told him in 1992 that "it wasn't a Jewish Communist who disfigured him .... He was knifed by an Irish woman".

British Union of Fascists

In 1932 Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Sir Oswald Mosley and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for the power of his oratory. The journalist and novelist Cecil Roberts described a speech given by Joyce:

Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking many minutes before we were electrified by this man ... so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic.

In 1934 Joyce was promoted to be the BUF's Director of Propaganda, replacing Wilfred Risdon, and later appointed deputy leader. As well as being a gifted speaker, Joyce gained the reputation of a savage brawler. His violent rhetoric and willingness to physically confront anti-fascist elements head-on played no small part in further politically marginalizing the BUF. After a bloody incident at a BUF rally in Olympia in 1934, Joyce spearheaded the group's policy shift from campaigning for economic revival through corporatism to a focus on antisemitism. He was instrumental in changing the name of the BUF to "British Union of Fascists and National Socialists" in 1936 and stood as a party candidate in the 1937 elections to the London County Council. In 1936, Joyce lived for a year in Whitstable, where he owned a radio and electrical shop.

Between April 1934 and 1937, when Mosley sacked him, Joyce served as Area Administrative Officer for the BUF West Sussex division. He was supported in the role by Norah Elam as Sussex Women's Organizer, with her partner Dudley Elam, the son of an Irish nationalist, taking on the role of Sub-Branch Officer for Worthing. Under this regime, West Sussex became a hub of fascist activity, ranging from hosting BUF summer camps to organizing meetings and rallies, lunches, etc. Elam shared many speaking platforms with Joyce and worked on propaganda speeches for him. One particular concern for Joyce was the Government of India Bill (passed in 1935) designed to give a measure of autonomy to India, allowing freedom and the development of limited self-government. Joyce harbored a desire to become Viceroy of India should Mosley ever head a BUF government, and is recorded as describing the backers of the bill as "feeble" and "one loathsome, foetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy, hiding behind Jewish Dictators".

Joyce was sacked from his paid position when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the 1937 elections, after which Joyce promptly formed a breakaway organization, the National Socialist League. After Joyce's departure, the BUF turned its focus from antisemitism to activism, opposing a war with Nazi Germany. Although Joyce had been deputy leader of the party from 1933 and an effective fighter and orator, Mosley snubbed him in his autobiography and later denounced him as a traitor because of his wartime activities. Unlike Joyce, the Elams did not escape detention under Defence Regulation 18B; both were arrested on the same day as Mosley in May 1940. In later life, Elam reported that, although she disliked Joyce, she believed that his execution by the British in 1946 was wrong, stating that he should not have been regarded as a traitor to England because he was not English, but Irish.

In Germany

In late August 1939, shortly before the Second World War broke out, Joyce and his wife Margaret fled to Germany. Joyce had been tipped off that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. He became a naturalized German citizen in 1940.

In Berlin, Joyce could not find employment until a chance meeting with fellow Mosleyite Dorothy Eckersley got him an audition at the Rundfunkhaus ("broadcasting house"). Eckersley was the former wife or second wife of the Chief Engineer of the BBC, Peter Eckersley. Despite having a heavy cold and having almost lost his voice, Joyce was recruited immediately for radio announcements and script-writing at German radio's English service. Joyce replaced Wolf Mittler.

The name "Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen" was coined in 1939 by the pseudonymous Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington, but this referred initially to Mittler (or possibly Norman Baillie-Stewart). When Joyce became the best-known propaganda broadcaster, the nickname was transferred to him. Joyce's broadcasts initially came from studios in Berlin, later being transferred (because of heavy Allied bombing) to Luxembourg City and finally to Apen near Hamburg, and were relayed over a network of German-controlled radio stations in Zeesen, Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais, and Oslo.

Joyce also broadcast on and wrote scripts for the German Büro Concordia organization, which ran several black propaganda stations, many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain. His role in writing the scripts increased over time, and German radio capitalized on his public persona. Initially an anonymous broadcaster, Joyce eventually revealed his real name to his listeners and he would occasionally be announced as, "William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw". Urban legends soon circulated about Lord Haw-Haw, alleging that the broadcaster was well-informed about political and military events to the point of near-omniscience.

Listening to Joyce's broadcasts was officially discouraged but was not illegal, and many Britons listened. There was a desire by civilian listeners to hear what the other side was saying, as information during wartime was strictly censored. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated six million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the UK. The broadcasts always began with the announcer's words, "Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling". These broadcasts urged the British people to surrender and were well known for their jeering, sarcastic and menacing tone.

The Reich Security Main Office commissioned Joyce to give lectures at the University of Berlin for SS members in the winter of 1941–42 on the topic of "British fascism and acute questions concerning the British world empire".

Joyce recorded his final broadcast on 30 April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. Rambling and audibly drunk, he chided the UK for pursuing the war beyond mere containment of Germany and repeatedly warned of the "menace" of the Soviet Union. He signed off with a final defiant, "Heil Hitler and farewell". There are conflicting accounts as to whether this last programme was actually transmitted, although a recording was found in the Apen studios. The next day, Radio Hamburg was seized by British forces, and on 4 May Wynford Vaughan-Thomas used it to make a mock "Germany Calling" broadcast denouncing Joyce.

Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included writing propaganda for distribution among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps of the Waffen-SS. He wrote a book Twilight Over England promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda, which unfavorably compared the evils of allegedly Jewish-dominated capitalist Britain with the alleged wonders of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler awarded Joyce the War Merit Cross (First and Second Class) for his broadcasts, although he never met Joyce.

Capture and trial

On 28 May 1945, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, near the German border with Denmark, which was the last capital of the Third Reich. Spotting a disheveled figure while they were resting from gathering firewood, intelligence soldiers – including a Jewish German, Geoffrey Perry (born Horst Pinschewer), who had left Germany before the war – engaged him in conversation in French and English, eventually recognizing his voice. After they asked whether he was Joyce, he reached into his pocket (actually reaching for a false passport); believing he was armed, Geoffrey Perry shot him through the buttocks, resulting in four wounds.

Two intelligence officers then drove Joyce to a border post and handed him over to British military police. He was then taken to London and tried at the Old Bailey on three counts of high treason:

William Joyce, on 18 September 1939, and on other days between that day and 29 May 1945, being a person owing allegiance to our Lord the King, and while a war was being carried on by the German Realm against our King, did traitorously adhere to the King's enemies in Germany, by broadcasting propaganda.

William Joyce, on 26 September 1940, being a person who owed allegiance as in the other count, adhered to the King's enemies by purporting to become naturalized as a subject of Germany.

William Joyce, on 18 September 1939, and on other days between that day and 2 July 1940 [i.e., before Joyce's naturalization as a German subject], being a person owing allegiance to our Lord the King, and while a war was being carried on by the German Realm against our King, did traitorously adhere to the King's enemies in Germany, by broadcasting propaganda.

"Not guilty" were the first words from Joyce's mouth in his trial, as noted by Rebecca West in her book The Meaning of Treason. The only evidence offered that he had begun broadcasting from Germany while his British passport was valid was the testimony of a London police inspector who had questioned him before the war while he was an active member of the British Union of Fascists and claimed to have recognized his voice on a propaganda broadcast in the early weeks of the war – Joyce had previous convictions for assault and riotous assembly in the 1930s.

Inquiries in the US, adduced in evidence at his trial, found that Joyce had never been a British subject, and it seemed that he would have to be acquitted based upon a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of betraying a country that was not his own. The trial judge, Mr. Justice Tucker, directed the jury to acquit Joyce of the first and second charges. However, the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, successfully argued that Joyce's possession of a British passport, even though he had misstated his nationality to get it, entitled him until it expired to British diplomatic protection in Germany and therefore he owed allegiance to the King at the time he began working for the Germans.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked in his book English History 1914–1945 that "Technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine."

Appeal

Joyce's conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal on 1 November 1945, and by Lords Jowitt L.C., Macmillan, Wright, Simonds, and Porter – although Porter dissented – of the House of Lords on 13 December 1945.

In the appeal, Joyce argued that possession of a passport did not entitle him to the protection of the Crown, and therefore did not perpetuate his duty of allegiance once he left the country, but the House of Lords rejected this argument. Lord Porter's dissenting opinion assumed that the question as to whether Joyce's duty of allegiance had terminated was a question of fact for the jury to decide, rather than a purely legal question for the judge. Joyce also argued that jurisdiction had been wrongly assumed by the court in electing to try an alien for offences committed in a foreign country. This argument was also rejected, on the basis that a state may exercise such jurisdiction in the interests of its own security.

Joyce's biographer, Nigel Farndale, suggests on the basis of documents made public for the first time between 2000 and 2005 that Joyce made a deal with his prosecutors not to reveal links he had had to MI5. In return, his wife Margaret, known to radio listeners as "Lady Haw-Haw", was spared prosecution for high treason. Of the 32 British renegades and broadcasters caught in Germany at the end of the war, only Margaret Joyce, who died in London in 1972, was not charged with treason.

Execution

Joyce went to his death unrepentant. He allegedly said:

In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the crushing imperialism of the Soviet Union. May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger in the West may the standard be raised from the dust, crowned with the words – "You have conquered nevertheless". I am proud to die for my ideals and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why.

"You have conquered nevertheless" was presumably a reference to "UND IHR HABT DOCH GESIEGT", a phrase inscribed on the reverse side of the Blood Order medal. Other sources refer to his having said, "May the swastika be raised from the dust".

Joyce was executed on 3 January 1946 at Wandsworth Prison, aged 39. He was the penultimate person hanged for a crime other than murder in the UK. The last was Theodore Schurch, executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville Prison. In both cases, the hangman was Albert Pierrepoint. Joyce died "an Anglican, like his mother, despite a long and friendly correspondence with a Roman Catholic priest who fought hard for William's soul". The scar on Joyce's face split wide open because of the pressure applied to his head upon his drop from the gallows.

As was customary for executed criminals, Joyce's remains were buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Wandsworth Prison. In 1976, following a campaign by his daughter, Heather Landalo, his body was re-interred in Galway, where he had lived with his family from 1909 until 1922. Despite the ambiguity of his religious allegiances, he was given a Roman Catholic Tridentine Mass.

Family

Joyce had two daughters by his first wife, Hazel, who later married Oswald Mosley's bodyguard, Eric Piercey. One daughter, Heather Landalo (formerly Piercey: stepfather's surname), has spoken publicly of her father.

Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller

 

Michael Clark Rockefeller (May 18, 1938 – presumed to have died November 19, 1961) was the fifth child of New York Governor and former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. He was the grandson of American financer John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the great grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller. He disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea, which is now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua. In 2014, Carl Hoffman published a book that went into detail about the inquest into his killing, in which villagers and tribal elders admit to Rockefeller being killed after he swam to shore in 1961. No remains or physical proof of Rockefeller's death have been discovered.

Early life

Rockefeller was the fifth and last child of Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller. He was the third son of seven children fathered by Nelson Rockefeller, and he had a twin sister, Mary.

After attending The Buckley School in New York, and graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was a student senator and exceptional varsity wrestler, Rockefeller graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a A.B. in history and economics. In 1960, he served for six months as a private in the U.S. Army and then went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to study the Dani tribe of western Netherlands New Guinea. The expedition filmed Dead Birds, an ethnographic documentary movie produced by Robert Gardner, and for which Rockefeller was the sound recordist. Rockefeller and a friend briefly left the expedition to study the Asmat tribe of southern Netherlands New Guinea. After returning home from the Peabody expedition, Rockefeller returned to New Guinea to study the Asmat and collect Asmat art.

"It's the desire to do something adventurous," he explained, "at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the word, are disappearing."

He spent his time in Netherlands New Guinea actively engaged with the culture and the art while recording ethnographic data. In one of his letters home he wrote:

I am having a thoroughly exhausting but most exciting time here ... The Asmat is like a huge puzzle with the variations in ceremony and art style forming the pieces. My trips are enabling me to comprehend (if only in a superficial, rudimentary manner) the nature of this puzzle ...

Disappearance

On November 17, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40-foot (12-meter) dugout canoe about 3 nautical miles (6 kilometers; 3 miles) from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned. Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming.

After drifting for some time, early on November 19, 1961, Rockefeller said to Wassing: "I think I can make it." He then swam for shore. The boat was an estimated 12 nmi (22 km; 14 mi) from the shore when he made the attempt to swim to safety, supporting the theory that he died from exposure, exhaustion, or drowning.

Wassing was rescued the next day, but Rockefeller was never seen again, despite an intensive and lengthy search effort. At the time, Rockefeller's disappearance was a major world news item. His body has never been found.

Rockefeller was declared legally dead in 1964.

Speculation

It was originally reported that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by a shark or saltwater crocodile. However, because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of Asmat in 1961, there has also been speculation that Rockefeller may have been killed and eaten by tribes-people from the Asmat village of Otsjanep.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin traveled to the island to investigate Rockefeller's disappearance. He dismissed reports of Rockefeller living as a captive or as a Kurtz-like figure in the jungle, but concluded that circumstantial evidence supported the idea that he had been killed. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958, thus providing some rationale for revenge by the tribe against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle, so it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle. The incident is described in "Dance of the Warriors", the second volume of the documentary series Ring of Fire by the Blair brothers.

A book titled Rocky Goes West by author Paul Toohey claims that, in 1979, Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator to go to New Guinea and try to resolve the mystery of his disappearance. The reliability of the story has been questioned, but Toohey claims that the private investigator swapped a boat engine for the skulls of the three men that a tribe claimed were the only white men they had ever killed. The investigator returned to New York and handed these skulls to the family, convinced that one of them was the skull of Rockefeller. If this event did actually occur, the family has never commented on it. However, the History Channel program Vanishings reported that Rockefeller's mother did pay a $250,000 reward to the investigator which was offered for final proof whether or not Michael Rockefeller was alive or dead.

In the documentary film Keep the River on Your Right, Tobias Schneebaum states that he spoke with some members of the Asmat village of Otsjanep who described finding Rockefeller on the riverside and eating him.

2014 book on disappearance

In 2014, Carl Hoffman published the book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art where he discusses researching Rockefeller's mysterious disappearance and presumed death. During multiple visits to the villages in the area, he heard several stories about men from Otsjanep killing Rockefeller after he swam to shore. The stories, which were similar to testimonials collected in the 1960s, center around a handful of men arguing and eventually deciding to kill Michael after he swam to shore, in revenge for a 1958 incident in which men from the village were killed in a confrontation with Dutch colonial officials. Soon after the murder, the villages were swept by a cholera epidemic and the villagers believed that it was retribution for killing Rockefeller. As Hoffman left one of the villages for the final time, he witnessed a man acting out a scene wherein someone was killed, and stopped to videotape it. When translated, the man was quoted as saying:

Don't you tell this story to any other man or any other village, because this story is only for us. Don't speak. Don't speak and tell the story. I hope you remember it and you must keep this for us. I hope. I hope. This is for you and you only. Don't talk to anyone, forever; to other people or another village. If people question you, don't answer. Don't talk to them, because this story is only for you. If you tell it to them, you'll die. I am afraid you will die. You'll be dead; your people will be dead, if you tell this story. You keep this story in your house; to yourself, I hope, forever. Forever. ...

Asmat artifacts and photographs

Many of the Asmat artifacts Rockefeller collected are part of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Peabody Museum has published the catalogue of an exhibition of pictures taken by Rockefeller during the New Guinea expedition.

In popular culture

The 1973, National Lampoon Comics contained a story (titled "New Guinea Pig") that focused on Rockefeller's disappearance as being a ruse so he could kill all the black people in New Guinea and his family could steal their resources.

Rockefeller's disappearance was the subject of episode #30 of In Search of ..., which originally aired January 21, 1978.

The band Guadalcanal Diary wrote a song about Rockefeller's disappearance called "Michael Rockefeller". The song appeared on their 1986 album Jamboree.

In the travel adventure book Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey, the Blair brothers claim to have discussed Rockefeller's death with a tribesman who killed him.

Christopher Stokes's short story "The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller", published in the 23rd issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Spring 2007), presents a fictional account of young Michael's demise.

The 2004 novel King of America by Samantha Gillison is loosely based on the life of Michael Rockefeller.

The 2007 film Welcome to the Jungle deals with two young couples who venture after Michael Rockefeller (thinking they can make a lot of money if they find evidence of Rockefeller), but meet grisly demises.

Jeff Cohen's play The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, based on the short story by Christopher Stokes, had its world premiere in an Off Broadway production at the West End Theatre in New York. The play was directed by Alfred Preisser, and ran from September 10 to October 3, 2010.

In 2011, Agamemnon Films released a documentary titled The Search for Michael Rockefeller, based on journalist Milt Machlin's book of the same name released in 1974. In his book, Carl Hoffman characterized Machlin's early book as "mostly the tale of a wild-goose chase", but still important in laying the groundwork for questioning official stories of Rockefeller's disappearance The film introduces a third theory, that Rockefeller survived and was living among the locals. This theory is supported by a verbal claim of contact made by a mysterious Australian adventurer, plus a few frames of film footage showing a bearded white man among indigenous men, wearing local garb.

In 2012, Michael's surviving twin sister Mary published a memoir, titled Beginning with the End: A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing, about coping with her grief after the death of her brother. The book was issued in paperback in 2014 as When Grief Calls Forth the Healing.

In their 2013 album The Devil Herself, band Megan Jean and the KFB features the song Tobias which features the lyrics "We lived amongst the tribe that ate Rockefeller / Out in Papua New Guinea I’d give you the skinny / Get eaten if I tell ya".

2017 Wichita Swatting

 

The 2017 Wichita swatting occurred on December 28, 2017, in Wichita, Kansas, United States. The incident began as an online dispute between Casey Viner and Shane Gaskill, regarding the video game Call of Duty: WWII. During the dispute, Viner threatened to have Gaskill swatted, and Gaskill responded by giving him a false address for his residence, one that was occupied by an uninvolved person, Andrew Finch. Viner then asked Tyler Barriss to make the required fraudulent call to initiate the swatting. Wichita Police responded to the address, and as Finch was exiting his house, police officer Justin Rapp fatally shot him.

Barriss pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and many other charges from unrelated incidents for which he was wanted. In March 2019, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Viner was sentenced to 2 years community service and 15 months imprisonment for his involvement, while Gaskill was sentenced to 2 years probation. Rapp was not charged for Finch's death.

Background

Tyler Barriss

At the time of the incident, Tyler Raj Barriss was a 25-year-old homeless man living in Los Angeles, California. Known online as "SWAuTistic", he had a criminal record including domestic violence, and had served 16 months in Los Angeles County Jail for making false bomb threats against KABC-TV, an elementary school in Los Angeles, and a middle school in Granada Hills. He was wanted by police in Panama City, Florida, for calling approximately 30 other bomb threats, including one to a high school, and on fraud and mischief charges in Canada for harassing a woman in Calgary.

Events of December 28

Reports surfaced that the deadly series of events reportedly began with an online argument over a $1.50 wager in an online match of Call of Duty: WWII on UMG Gaming, which operates online tournaments, including one involving said game. Two men, Casey Viner (known by pseudonym Baperizer) and Shane Gaskill (known by pseudonym Miruhcle), fought over friendly fire in the Call of Duty: WWII match, causing them to lose both the match and $1.50 in wagers. The two gamers took to Twitter in an argument about the loss.

Viner threatened to swat Gaskill over the loss. Gaskill intentionally gave Viner the wrong address: a place in Wichita where he previously resided with his family, and where he said he would "be waiting". Gaskill's family had been evicted in 2016. Viner then contacted Barriss and provided him with the address given to swat Gaskill. Finch was not a known gamer and had nothing to do with the Call of Duty match.

Using voice over IP through the free Wi-Fi provided by a South Los Angeles library, Barriss called the Wichita police department. Because the call was transferred from Wichita City Hall to 911, the dispatcher believed the call was coming from the Wichita area. Barriss, identifying himself as "Brian", claimed that he was at the residence at 1033 West McCormick Street, had fatally shot his father, and was holding family members at gunpoint. He asked if police were coming to the house, saying he had already poured gasoline all over the house and was threatening to set it on fire.

Shooting

Wichita Police Department officers, who were not SWAT team members, untrained for tactical situations or hostage rescues, responded to Barriss' call and surrounded Finch's residence. Andrew Finch is reported by his mother Lisa Finch, who was at the scene, to have seen the police lights outside and opened the front door to see what was happening. Mrs. Finch reports that her 28-year-old son "screamed and then they shot him." Moments after Finch stepped onto his front porch, police ordered him to put his hands up. According to officer testimony, he began to do so and then stopped. A Wichita police officer standing on the other side of the street fired a single round striking Finch and piercing his heart and right lung. Finch was transported to St. Francis Hospital, where he was pronounced dead 17 minutes after he was shot.

Finch's mother reports the police then ordered her and other family members to exit the residence. The family was handcuffed and taken to the police station for questioning. Initial reports from Deputy Wichita Police Chief Troy Livingston stated that "A male came to the front door. As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon." Livingston did not initially state if Finch was armed, or what caused the officer to fire his weapon. In a later statement on December 30, the Wichita Police Department stated the shooting was caused by Finch "reaching into his waistband." The officer involved was eventually identified as Justin Rapp, a seven-year veteran of the force.

In court, Rapp testified in May 2018 that he was given no information when he arrived at the scene, including when Finch was given his first verbal command, when the 911 call ended, or whether officers at the scene were aware the caller was still on the phone with 911. Sedgwick County Department of Emergency Communications has also denied an open-records request pertaining to the 911 call, stating the police department had asked that no more records be released.

Aftermath

Many Wichita residents and other U.S.-based commentators have expressed concern over the death of Finch. Wichita residents used the opportunity of a city council meeting on January 9 to voice concerns on the subject, including questioning the release of only seven seconds of the police body cam footage, and arguing the city should assume full responsibility to avoid a lengthy struggle by the Finch family for justice. The council did not comment directly, but indicated a willingness to consider training procedures at a later time.

Nearly a week after the shooting, Andrew Finch's mother Lisa Finch wrote to the Wichita mayor and police chief stating that she did not know where her son's body was being kept and that she wanted to give him a "proper funeral service and burial." "Please let me see my son's lifeless body," she wrote in a letter dated January 3. In the same letter, Mrs. Finch asked why the police officer who killed her son had not, at that time, been identified, why the family was handcuffed, and when police will return their belongings, including two cell phones and a computer, seized from the house. The family attorney, Andrew M. Stroth, has also called for the city, police department, and officer involved in the shooting to be held liable "for the unjustified shooting of Andrew Finch."

Finch's 18-year-old niece Adelina died by suicide on January 11, 2019. Adelina was raised by Lisa and Andrew Finch after her own mother had died; she was 17 at the time of the shooting and witnessed her uncle's death. Lisa Finch blames Adelina's death on the events of December 28.

Parties involved

Shooting victim

Andrew Thomas Finch, aged 28; father of two, who had no affiliation with either the three men or the Call of Duty game.

Call of Duty: WWII players

Casey "Baperizer" Viner, 18; of North College Hill, Ohio (sentenced to 2 years' community service, and 1 year and 3 months in prison)

Shane "Miruhcle" Gaskill, 19; of Wichita, Kansas (sentenced to 2 years' probation)

911 hoax caller

Tyler Raj "SWAuTistic" Barriss, 25; of Los Angeles, California (sentenced to 20 years in federal prison)

Involved officer

Justin Rapp, Officer, Wichita Police Department; originally stated he believed Finch had a gun, but testified in May 2018 that he merely saw Finch make a motion with his hand (not charged with any crime)

Legal proceedings

Barriss was arrested on December 29, 2017, in Los Angeles on a fugitive warrant stemming from a 2015 charge of making false bomb threats to KABC-TV, and was charged with false alarm, a felony. On January 12, 2018, Barriss was extradited to Kansas, where he was charged with involuntary manslaughter and held in Sedgwick County Jail.

Barriss, Viner and Gaskill were indicted in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas on May 23 on charges related to the swatting. Barriss was charged with false information and hoaxes, cyber-stalking resulting in death, making threats of death or damage to property by fire, interstate threats, conspiracy to make false reports, and wire fraud. Viner was charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to make false/hoax reports, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Gaskill was charged with obstruction of justice, wire fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Gaskill was re-indicted in July on additional charges after it was discovered that he goaded Barriss to "try again" after the fatal shooting.

On October 26, 2018, forty-six additional charges against Barriss were added, which included financial fraud, and fake threats of bombs and shootings made to police and schools; some of these charges involved unindicted co-conspirators residing in Des Plaines, Illinois; Gulf Breeze, Florida; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Greenwood, Missouri. On November 13 he pleaded guilty to 51 federal charges, for which U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister recommended a sentence of 20 years' incarceration. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Barriss has also been required to formally apologize to Finch's family and pay $10,100 in fines and restitution, and has agreed to five years of supervised release.

Barriss' sentencing was held March 29, 2019; he received 90 months' imprisonment for the California charges, and 150 months for the Kansas charges, to be served consecutively. Barriss also paid a $5,000 fine, the full amount of which was awarded by the Kansas Crime Victims Compensation Board to Finch's family as restitution. He is scheduled to be released from FCI Phoenix on January 14, 2035.

In April 2019, Viner pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice, and was sentenced in September to a 15-month prison sentence in addition to two years' probation, during which time he would be banned from playing video games. Viner was released from custody at USP Big Sandy on November 14, 2020.

In September 2019, it was reported that Gaskill struck a deal for deferred prosecution that could allow the charges against him to be dropped. Under terms of Gaskill's pretrial diversion agreement, the government agreed not to pursue prosecution for at least 18 months. Gaskill agreed to waive any speedy trial defenses and pay $1,000 in restitution, costs and penalties.

Legislative response

In response to Finch's slaying, the Kansas state legislature approved a bill in March 2018 to establish creating a false alarm resulting in injury or death as a class-one felony, carrying a prison sentence between 10 and 41 years. The bill was signed into law by Governor Jeff Colyer on April 12.

The Andrew T. Finch Memorial Act of 2018 was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Ron Estes in March 2018. The bill, also known as the Preventing Swatting and Protecting Our Communities Act of 2018, would make providing false information with the intent to cause an emergency response punishable by up to five years' imprisonment, up to 20 years' imprisonment if serious injury results, and up to life imprisonment if the act results in death. The bill was referred to the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, but was never taken up for a vote and died in committee.

Rep. Eliot Engel introduced a bill in January 2019 to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to provide for enhanced penalties for the transmission of misleading or inaccurate caller identification information with the intent to trigger an emergency response. As of March 2019, it has been referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Russian Apartment Bombings Part II

 

Suspects and accused

In September 1999, hundreds of Chechen nationals (out of the more than 100,000 permanently living in Moscow) were briefly detained and interrogated in Moscow, as a wave of anti-Chechen sentiments swept the city. However, no Chechens were tried for the Buinaksk, Moscow or Volgodonsk attacks. Rather, it were Dagestani Wahhabis in the case of the Buinaksk bombing, and Karachay Wahhabis in the case of Moscow and Volgodonsk attacks.

According to the official investigation, the following people either delivered explosives, stored them, or harbored other suspects:

Moscow bombings

Ibn al-Khattab (a Saudi-born Mujahid), who was poisoned by the FSB in 2002.

Achemez Gochiyayev (an ethnic Karachai, has not been arrested; he is still at large)

Denis Saitakov (an ethnic Tatar from Uzbekistan), killed in Georgia in 1999–2000

Khakim Abayev (an ethnic Karachai), killed by FSB special forces in May 2004 in Ingushetia

Ravil Akhmyarov (a Russian citizen), Surname indicates an ethnic Tatar, killed in Chechnya in 1999–2000

Yusuf Krymshamkhalov (an ethnic Karachai and resident of Kislovodsk), arrested in Georgia in December 2002, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004, after a two-month secret trial held without a jury

Stanislav Lyubichev (a traffic police inspector, resident of Kislovodsk, Stavropol Krai), who helped the truck with explosives pass the checkpoint after getting a sack of sugar as a bribe, sentenced to four years in May 2003

Volgodonsk bombing

Timur Batchayev (an ethnic Karachai), killed in Georgia in the clash with police during which Krymshakhalov was arrested

Zaur Batchayev (an ethnic Karachai) killed in Chechnya in 1999–2000

Adam Dekkushev (an ethnic Karachai), arrested in Georgia, threw a grenade at police during the arrest, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004, after a two-month secret trial held without a jury

Buinaksk bombing

Isa Zainutdinov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001

Alisultan Salikhov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001

Magomed Salikhov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, arrested in Azerbaijan in November 2004, extradited to Russia, found not guilty on the charge of terrorism by the jury on 24 January 2006; found guilty of participating in an armed force and illegal crossing of the national border, he was retried again on the same charges on 13 November 2006 and again found not guilty, this time on all charges, including the ones he was found guilty of in the first trial. According to Kommersant Salikhov admitted that he made a delivery of paint to Dagestan for Ibn al-Khattab, although he was not sure what was really delivered.

Ziyavudin Ziyavudinov (a native of Dagestan), arrested in Kazakhstan, extradited to Russia, sentenced to 24 years in April 2002

Abdulkadyr Abdulkadyrov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to 9 years in March 2001

Magomed Magomedov (Sentenced to 9 years in March 2001)

Zainutdin Zainutdinov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty

Makhach Abdulsamedov (a native of Dagestan, sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty).

Attempts at an independent investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.

An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyov. The commission started its work in February 2002. On 5 March Sergei Yushenkov and Duma member Yuli Rybakov flew to London where they met Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin. After this meeting, Trepashkin began working with the commission.

However, the public commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003, respectively. Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was assaulted in November 2003 and two years later, on 3 November 2005, he died in a hospital after a car accident.

The commission asked lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin to investigate the case. Trepashkin claimed to have found that the basement of one of the bombed buildings was rented by FSB officer Vladimir Romanovich and that the latter was witnessed by several people. Trepashkin also investigated a letter attributed to Achemez Gochiyayev and found that the alleged assistant of Gochiyayev who arranged the delivery of sacks might have been Kapstroi-2000 vice president Alexander Karmishin, a resident of Vyazma.

Trepashkin was unable to bring the alleged evidence to the court because he was arrested in October 2003 (on charges of illegal arms possession) and imprisoned in Nizhny Tagil, just a few days before he was to make his findings public. He was sentenced by a Moscow military closed court to four years imprisonment on a charge of revealing state secrets. Amnesty International issued a statement that "there are serious grounds to believe that Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and convicted under falsified criminal charges which may be politically motivated, in order to prevent him continuing his investigative and legal work related to the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities".

In a letter to Olga Konskaya, Trepashkin wrote that some time before the bombings, Moscow's Regional Directorate against Organized Crimes (RUOP GUVD) arrested several people for selling the explosive RDX. Following that, Nikolai Patrushev's Directorate of FSB officers came to the GUVD headquarters, captured evidence and ordered the investigators fired. Trepashkin wrote that he learned about the story at a meeting with several RUOP officers in the year 2000. They claimed that their colleagues could present eyewitness accounts in a court. They offered a video tape with evidence against the RDX dealers. Mr Trepashkin did not publicize the meeting fearing for lives of the witnesses and their families.

According to Trepashkin, his supervisors and the people from the FSB promised not to arrest him if he left the Kovalev commission and started working together with the FSB "against Alexander Litvinenko".

On 24 March 2000, two days before the presidential elections, NTV Russia featured the Ryazan events of Fall 1999 in the talk show Independent Investigation. The talk with the residents of the Ryazan apartment building along with FSB public relations director Alexander Zdanovich and Ryazan branch head Alexander Sergeyev was filmed few days earlier. On 26 March, Boris Nemtsov voiced his concern over the possible shut-down of NTV for airing the talk. Seven months later, NTV general manager Igor Malashenko [ru] said at the JFK School of Government that Information Minister Mikhail Lesin warned him on several occasions. Malashenko's recollection of Lesin's warning was that by airing the talk show NTV "crossed the line" and that the NTV managers were "outlaws" in the eyes of the Kremlin. According to Alexander Goldfarb, Mr. Malashenko told him that Valentin Yumashev brought a warning from the Kremlin, one day before airing the show, promising in no uncertain terms that the NTV managers "should consider themselves finished" if they went ahead with the broadcast.

Artyom Borovik was among the people who investigated the bombings. He received numerous death threats and died in a suspicious plane crash in March 2000 that was regarded by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky as a probable assassination.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security service member Alexander Litvinenko, who investigated the bombings, were killed in 2006.

Surviving victims of the Guryanova street bombing asked President Dmitry Medvedev to resume the official investigation in 2008, but it was not resumed.

In a 2017 discussion at the RFE/RL Sergei Kovalyov said: "I think that the Chechen trace was skillfully fabricated. No one from the people who organized the bombings was found, and no one actually was looking for them". He then was asked by Vladimir Kara-Murza if he believes that several key members of his commission, and even Boris Berezovskiy and Boris Nemtsov who "knew quite a few things about the bombings" were killed to prevent the independent investigation. Kovalev responded: "I cannot state with full confidence that the explosions were organized by the authorities. Although it's clear that the explosions were useful for them, useful for future President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, because he had just promised to "waste in the outhouse" (as he said) everyone who had any relation to terrorism. It was politically beneficial for him to scare people with terrorism. That is not proven. But what can be stated with full confidence is this: the investigation of both the Moscow explosions and the so-called "exercises" in Ryazan is trumped up. There can be various possibilities. It seems to me, that Ryazan should have been the next explosion, but I cannot prove that."

Russian government involvement theory

According to David Satter, Yuri Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Boris Kagarlitsky, the bombings were a successful false flag operation coordinated by the Russian state security services to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and to bring Putin to power. Some of them described the bombings as typical "active measures" practiced by the KGB in the past. The war in Chechnya boosted Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin's popularity, and brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma and Putin to the presidency within a few months.

During the testimony of David Satter in the United States House of Representatives, he stated that:

With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For "Operation Successor" to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.

According to a reconstruction of the events by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky:

The bombings in Buynaksk were carried out by a team of twelve GRU officers who were sent to Dagestan and supervised by the head of GRU's 14th Directorate General Kostechenko. That version was partly based on a testimony by Aleksey Galkin. The bombing in Buynaksk was conducted by the GRU to avoid an "interagency conflict between the FSB and the Ministry of Defense".

In Moscow, Volgodonsk and Ryazan, the attacks were organized by the FSB through a chain of command that included director of the counter-terrorism department General German Ugryumov, FSB operatives Maxim Lazovsky, Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshekov and others. Achemez Gochiyayev, Tatyana Korolyeva, and Alexander Karmishin rented warehouses that received shipments of hexogen disguised as sugar and did not know that the explosives were delivered.

Adam Dekkushev, Krymshamkhalov, and Timur Batchayev were recruited by FSB agents who presented themselves as "Chechen separatists" to deliver explosives to Volgodonsk and Moscow.

Names and the fate of FSB agents who planted the bomb in the city of Ryazan remain unknown.

Support

Historians, journalists and politicians

The view about the bombings being organized and perpetrated by Russian state security services was originally put forward by investigative journalist David Satter and historians Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, in co-authorship with Alexander Litvinenko. It was later supported by a number of historians. Amy Knight, a historian of the KGB, wrote that it was "abundantly clear" that the FSB was responsible for carrying out the attacks and that Vladimir Putin's "guilt seems clear," since it was inconceivable that the FSB would have done so without the sanction of Putin, the agency's former director and by then Prime Minister of Russia. In her book Putin's Kleptocracy, historian Karen Dawisha summarized evidence related to the bombings and concluded that "to blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action almost unthinkable. Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible." According to Timothy Snyder, "it seemed possible" that the perpetrators of the apartment bombings were FSB officers. David Satter considered the bombings as a political provocation by the Russian secret services that was similar to the burning of the Reichstag.

This view has been also supported by investigative journalists. In 2008, British journalist Edward Lucas concluded in his book The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West that "The weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation: that the attacks were a ruthlessly planned stunt to create a climate of panic and fear in which Putin would quickly become the country's indisputable leader, as indeed he did." In the September 2009 issue of GQ, veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson wrote about on Putin's role in the Russian apartment bombings, based in part on his interviews with Mikhail Trepashkin. The journal owner, Condé Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation.

Former Russian State Security Council chief Alexandr Lebed in his 29 September 1999 interview with Le Figaro said he was almost convinced that the government organized the terrorist acts. Andrei Illarionov, a former key economic adviser to the Russian president, said that FSB involvement "is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no other element that could have organized the bombings except for the FSB." Later Lebed's public relations staff claimed that he was quoted out of the context.

Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer noted that "The FSB accused Khattab and Gochiyaev, but oddly they did not point the finger at Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov's regime, which is what the war was launched against."

A number of US politicians commented that they consider credible the allegations about Russian state security services as the actual organizers of the bombings. In 2003, U.S. senator John McCain said that "It was during Mr. Putin's tenure as Prime Minister in 1999 that he launched the Second Chechen War following the Moscow apartment bombings. There remain credible allegations that Russia's FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks. Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000 by pointing a finger at the Chechens for committing these crimes, launching a new military campaign in Chechnya, and riding a frenzy of public anger into office."

On 11 January 2017, senator Marco Rubio raised the issue of the 1999 bombings during the confirmation hearings for Rex Tillerson. According to senator Rubio, "there's [an] incredible body of reporting, open source and other, that this was all—all those bombings were part of a black flag operation on the part of the FSB." On 10 January 2018, senator Ben Cardin of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report entitled "Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security". According to the report, "no credible evidence has been presented by the Russian authorities linking Chechen terrorists, or anyone else, to the Moscow bombings."

According to Satter, all four bombings that occurred had a similar "signature" which indicated that the explosives had been carefully prepared, a mark of skilled specialists. There is also no explanation as to how the terrorists were able to obtain tons of hexogen explosive and transport it to various locations in Russia; hexogen is produced in one plant in Perm Oblast for which the central FSB is responsible for the security. The culprits would also have needed to organize nine explosions (the four that occurred and the five attempted bombings reported by the authorities) in different cities in a two-week period. Satter's estimate for the time required for target plan development, site visits, explosives preparation, renting space at the sites and transporting explosives to the sites was four to four and a half months.

Books and films

The theory of Russian government involvement has been supported in a number of books and movies on the subject.

David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, authored two books Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State and The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (published by Yale University Press in 2003 and 2016) where he scrutinized the events and came to the conclusion that the bombings were organized by Russian state security services.(Satter 2003)

In 2002, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and historian Yuri Felshtinsky published a book Blowing up Russia: Terror from within.(Felshtinsky & Litvinenko 2007) According to authors the bombings and other terrorist acts have been committed by Russian security services to justify the Second Chechen War and to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

In another book, Lubyanka Criminal Group, Litvinenko and Alexander Goldfarb described the transformation of the FSB into a criminal and terrorist organization, including conducting the bombings. (Litvinenko 2002) Former GRU analyst and historian Viktor Suvorov said that the book describes "a leading criminal group that provides "protection" for all other organized crime in the country and which continues the criminal war against their own people", like their predecessors NKVD and KGB. He added: "The book proves: Lubyanka [the KGB headquarters] was taken over by enemies of the people. ... If Putin's team can not disprove the facts provided by Litvinenko, Putin must shoot himself. Patrushev and all other leadership of Lubyanka Criminal Group must follow his example."

Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko published a book Death of a Dissident. They asserted that the murder of Mr. Litvinenko was "the most compelling proof" of the FSB involvement theory. According to the book, the murder of Litvinenko "gave credence to all his previous theories, delivering justice for the tenants of the bombed apartment blocks, the Moscow theater-goers, Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya, and the half-exterminated nation of Chechnya, exposing their killers for the whole world to see."

A PBS Frontline documentary on Vladimir Putin also mentioned the theory and FSB involvement, citing the quick removal of rubble and bodies from the bombing scenes before any investigation could take place, the discovery of the Ryazan bomb, the deaths of several people who had attempted to investigate the bombings, as well as the defused Ryazan bomb being made of Russian military explosives and detonators.

A documentary film Assassination of Russia was made in 2000 by two French producers who had previously worked on NTV's Sugar of Ryazan program.

A documentary Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about the bombing controversy made by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov was premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the story of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, the two Russian-American sisters, who had lost their mother in the attack, and decided to find out who did it. His next film on the subject was Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case. The film doesn't intend to investigate the Litvinenko murder, rather than that, its goal is to put the case into a wider context of the events unfolding in post-Soviet Russia.

Yuli Dubov, author of The Big Slice, wrote a novel The Lesser Evil, based on the bombings. The main characters of the story are Platon (Boris Berezovsky) and Larry (Badri Patarkatsishvili). They struggle against an evil KGB officer, Old man (apparently inspired by the legendary Philipp Bobkov), who brings another KGB officer, Fedor Fedorovich (Vladimir Putin) to power by staging a series of apartment bombings.

Criticism

In March 2000, Putin dismissed the allegations of FSB involvement in the bombings as "delirious nonsense." "There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such crime against their own people. The very allegation is immoral," he said. An FSB spokesman said that "Litvinenko's evidence cannot be taken seriously by those who are investigating the bombings". According to Strobe Talbott who was a United States Deputy Secretary of State during the events, "there was no evidence to support" the "conspiracy theory, although Russian public opinion did indeed solidify behind Putin in his determination to carry out a swift, decisive counteroffensive."

According to Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, "From the start, it seemed that the Kremlin was determined to suppress all discussion ... When Alexander Podrabinek, a Russian human rights activist, tried to import copies of Litvinenko's and Felshtinsky's Blowing up Russia in 2003, they were confiscated by the FSB. Trepashkin himself, acting as a lawyer for two relatives of the victims of the blast, was unable to obtain information he requested and was entitled to see by law". However, Soldatov believed that the obstruction might reflect "'paranoia' rather than guilt on the part of the authorities". Consequently, Soldatov argued, that paranoia has produced the very conspiracy theories that the Russian Government intended to eradicate. In their book The New Nobility, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan believe that the Ryazan incident had actually been a training exercise. According to the authors, such exercises are typical for Vympel, a unit of the FSB whose mission is to verify the efficacy of counter-terrorism measures at sites such as nuclear plants. In authors' opinion, the book Blowing Up Russia by Felshtinsky and Litvinenko contained no new evidence against the FSB, and claims by Trepashkin were highly dubious. Soldatov and Borogan noted that the main point of allegations against the FSB was that Achemez Gochiyaev was an innocent businessman, who was made a scapegoat by the FSB and falsely accused of perpetrating the bombings. However, according to Soldatov and Borogan, Gochiyaev was a leader of a local Islamist group since the mid-1990s, and Dekkushev and Krymshamkhalov were members of the same group called "Muslim Society No. 3". According to Russian state security services, the group was founded in 1995, counted more than 500 members by 2001, and was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in the 2000s. Soldatov and Borogan have also noted a partial admission of guilt by Dekkushev and Krymshamkhalov during a trial in 2003.

According to Robert Bruce Ware, the simplest explanation for the apartment block blasts is that they were perpetrated by Islamist extremists from North Caucasus who sought retribution for the attacks of the Federal forces against the Islamist enclave in the central Dagestan, known as the Islamic Djamaat. Ware points out that that would explain the timing of the attacks, and why there were no attacks after the date on which the insurgents were driven from Dagestan. It would also explain why no Chechen claimed responsibility. Also it would explain Basayev's reference to responsibility of Dagestanis and it would be consistent with the initial vow of Khattab to set off the bombs blasting through Russian cities. Ware also criticizes an argument that David Satter and Rajan Menon use to support the view of Russian security services responsibility for the bombings—that the apartment block explosions involved hexogen, which is a highly controlled substance in Russia and is extraordinarily difficult to obtain. According to Ware, that's not the case, as sizable amounts of hexogen (as well as other weaponry) were readily available in Dagestan. As a proof, Ware cites the police reports of the program for voluntary surrender of arms in Dagestan which ran for a couple of months in 2003 and revealed large quantities of hexogen and ammonite.

Max Abrahms, a researcher who is critical of the efficacy of terrorism in general, argued that the bombings were detrimental for the self-determination of Chechnya. He noted that the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria has achieved a de facto independence from Russia after the Khasavyurt Accord, with two thirds of Russian citizens favoring the separation of the breakaway republic. However, the public opinion in Russia has changed dramatically after the bombings. Most Russians started "baying for blood" and strongly supporting the war with Chechnya that became inevitable and led to the loss of the independence as a result of the bombings. According to Abrahms, this supports his theory that attacks by terrorist organizations have been always counterproductive for the perpetrators and therefore gave rise to conspiracy theories about alternative perpetrators who actually benefited from the events.

Political scientist Ronald R. Pope in his review of David Satter's book Darkness at Dawn cited Kirill Pankratov's criticism, published as a contribution to Johnson's Russia List. Regarding the apartment bombings, Pankratov argued that the Russian authorities did not need an additional justification to wage a war against Chechnya, in view of high-profile kidnappings and the invasion of Dagestan. One of his other arguments was that the theory of FSB responsibility for the bombings implied that it had been able to keep the lid on the operation much more effectively than the FSB had been able to execute it.

Political scientist Brian Taylor believes that there's too little evidence to decide which version of the events is correct, as the available evidence is fragmentary and controversial. Taylor identifies several reasons to doubt the conspiracy version. First, while the bombings did propel Putin to power, by itself it's not the evidence that this was the goal of the attacks. Second, there was a casus belli even without the bombings—namely, the invasion of Dagestan and multiple kidnappings in the region in the preceding years. Third, if the goal of the bombings was to justify a new war, one or two bombings in Moscow would be more than adequate. Any subsequent bombings would be potentially dangerous, because they would increase the risk to expose the conspiracy. Fourth, he believes that a plot involving multiple players and a large number of FSB operatives could not be kept secret. According to Taylor, it's plausible that FSB "simulated" an attack in Ryazan in order to claim credit for "uncovering" it; however the plot was foiled by vigilant local denizens and law enforcement personnel. The "training exercise" justification was improvised after the plot failed.

Yuri Luzhkov, a mayor of Moscow at the time of the bombings, believed that the bombings in Moscow were facilitated by the new piece of legislation that established Freedom of movement within the country—which was restricted prior to 1993. According to Luzhkov, the law made it possible for Chechen terrorists to bring weapons to Moscow and store them there, as well as purchase auto vehicles and provide housing for tens of bandits who had arrived in Moscow. According to Luzhkov, "for three months, after having arrived in Moscow, a terrorist could live wherever he wanted and stay with anyone, without notifying the police", which allowed the criminals to prepare the bombings.

Aimen Dean, a Western spy within the al-Qaeda, reported on a phone call with Abu Said al-Kurdi—a logistics chief for Chechen jihadis in 1999, according to Dean. Al-Kurdi admitted that the apartment bombings were perpetrated by the Islamic Emirate to revenge the atrocities committed by the Moscow OMON in the Caucasus. It took 19 months of surveillance and preparations, which involved bribing to facilitate smuggling bombs, materials and trucks. Only Shamil Basayev and Ibn Khattab were aware of the plan, while Maskhadov didn't know about it.

Sealing information by the US government

On 14 July 2016, David Satter filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the State Department, the CIA and the FBI, inquiring about documents pertaining to the apartment bombings, the Ryazan incident and persons who tried to investigate the bombings and were killed. The agencies acknowledged receipt of the requests, but Satter received no other response within the statutory time limit. On 29 August 2016, Satter filed suit against the Department of Justice and other agencies involved. However, CIA refused even to acknowledge the existence of any relevant records because doing so would reveal "very specific aspects of the Agency's intelligence interest, or lack thereof, in the Russian bombings."

The State Department responded with a redacted copy of a cable from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. According to the cable, on 24 March 2000, a former member of Russian intelligence services told a U.S. diplomat that the real story about the Ryazan incident could never be known because it "would destroy the country." The informant said the FSB had "a specially trained team of men" whose mission was "to carry out this type of urban warfare". The informant has also said that Viktor Cherkesov, the FSB's first deputy director and an interrogator of Soviet dissidents was "exactly the right person to order and carry out such actions."

David Satter made a renewed FOIA request, and on 22 March 2017, State Department responded that documents concerning the U.S. assessment of the bombings would remain secret. A draft Vaughn index, a document used by agencies to justify withholdings in FOIA cases, said that the release of that information had "the potential to inject friction into or cause serious damage" to relationships with the Russian Government that were "vital to U.S. national security".

On 16 March 2018, the case Satter v. Department of Justice was closed.

Impact on survivors

Multiple survivors of the bombings have developed disabilities, many of them were diagnosed with a post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2006 Irina Khalai, a survivor of the Volgodonsk bombing, has founded an NGO "Volga-Don", which promotes legislation for the legal recognition of victims of terrorist attacks.

Chronology of events

5 August 1999: Shamil Basayev enters western Dagestan from Chechnya, starting the War of Dagestan

9 August 1999: Stepashin is dismissed and Putin becomes prime minister

22 August 1999: The forces of Shamil Basayev withdraw back into Chechnya

25 August 1999: Russian jets make bombing runs against 16 sites in Chechnya

4 September 1999: Bombing in Buynaksk, 64 people killed, 133 are injured

9 September 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Pechatniki, 94 people are killed, 249 are injured

13 September 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Kashirskoye highway, 118 are killed

13 September 1999: A bomb is defused and a warehouse containing several tons of explosives and six timing devices are found in Moscow

13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that took place only three days later, on 16 September

16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 18 are killed, 288 injured

23 September 1999: An apartment bomb is found in the city of Ryazan. Vladimir Rushailo announces that police prevented a terrorist act. Vladimir Putin praises the vigilance of the citizens and called for the air bombing of Grozny

23–24 September 1999: According to David Satter, FSB agents who planted the bomb in Ryazan are arrested by local police

24 September 1999: Nikolai Patrushev declares that the incident was a training exercise

24 September 1999: Second Chechen War begins