I was born and raised in Michigan, and attended Michigan State University, 7 miles south of Bath Township. I had never heard of the Bath School disaster (better called a massacre) until a Chicago columnist recently wrote about it. Twenty children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook; thirty-eight children and six adults were blown to pieces when a vengeful local farmer detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives carefully disposed inside the Bath consolidated school in 1927. What happened and why doesn’t anyone know about it? Harold Schechter’s book Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer (New York: Little A, 2021) intends to tell us, with somewhat mixed success.
In an odd first chapter, Schechter provides a capsule introduction to the region of central Michigan that is now in Clinton County. In breathless tabloid prose (unfortunately, a tone he sustains throughout), he recounts some early inter-tribe indigenous conflicts liberally larded with terms like “bloody,” “butchery,” “slaughter,” “superstitious awe,” and “primitive fears.” Is he suggesting the Bath School Massacre grew out of some kind of cursed land, not to mention the “savage” stereotype he uncomfortably approaches? It’s twenty-some pages before we meet even the ancestral Kehoes, refugees from the Irish potato famine, who ultimately produce Andrew Kehoe in 1872, the main actor of this nightmare.
Andrew Kehoe was smart, hard-working, clever about mechanics and engineering. His mother died when he was a teenager. He drifted and worked in various places, as a dairyman in my hometown for a time, and as a lineman in Iowa. Somewhere along the way, though the evidence is sparse, he apparently sustained a “severe fall” that reportedly left him “semi-conscious” for weeks. By 1910, at nearly 40, he was back home with his father, who had remarried a much younger woman. At that time, gasoline-powered stoves (“Have your husband’s warm breakfast on the table in half an hour!”) had become popular – and Schechter recites numerous news accounts of deadly explosions caused by these stoves. Kehoe’s stepmother lights the stove one morning and as Kehoe looks on, it blows up, spraying her with flames. It occurs to him to throw water on her, which only spreads the fuel and fire. She dies a horrific death. Schechter doomily announces that “only later, when the world learned exactly what [he] was capable of, did rumors spread…” that maybe he had rigged the stove on purpose. But this idea ends here.
The following year, Kehoe marries the niece of a prominent and wealthy local farmer. Trouble starts with the neighbors: he angrily chases off the priest collecting money for a new church building; he breaks off relations with a neighbor over a sale of cattle who die due to Kehoe’s own negligence. The rich uncle dies; Kehoe takes out a mortgage to buy his farm. He manages to fight with the buyer of his own farm over a pile of firewood. This is the man that Schechter describes on p. 8 as “a respected citizen, admired by his neighbors”? Well, when they move to the new farm, his wife’s established friends and relatives welcome them. He is handy and helps people fix things. But there’s an arrogance about him: he wears a three-piece suit to plow his fields, and chides people who lose at cards or who didn’t go to college like he did. And the animal abuse is appalling: he beats a horse to death, he shoots a neighbor’s lost dog for coming on his property, and he seems to have killed his stepsister’s pet cat.
Enter the local school superintendent. A new consolidated school is to be built; the childless Kehoe bitterly resents paying any tax to fund it. He wangles his way onto the school board where he fights every expenditure, he “forgets” to deliver the superintendent’s paychecks and halves his vacation time. His mechanical skills lead him to take over maintenance of the school building, with free run of it 24/7. He falls badly behind on his mortgage. The school board is sick of him; he runs for township clerk – and loses. In the fall of 1926, he drives down to Jackson, MI and buys 500 pounds of pyrotol, a war-surplus explosive used to clear rocks and stumps in fields. The dealer thought nothing of it, assuming it was for normal purposes… but, as Schechter duly warns us: “But he was wrong.”
Seven months later, on the last day of school, Kehoe murders his wife and sets his farm on fire, having hobbled his horses with wire to be sure they cannot escape. At 8:45 AM, the carefully placed and wired explosives go off, collapsing half the building on schoolchildren and teachers. As hysterical parents and frantic first responders flock to the carnage, Kehoe pulls up in his truck. He beckons over the superintendent – and detonates his explosives-and-shrapnel-packed truck. Schechter enjoys telling us about the skein of intestine wrapped around the truck’s steering wheel – and the gawker who snips off a piece of it as a souvenir. Within days, postcards are being sold depicting the rows of children’s bodies, and Mrs. Kehoe’s charred corpse. And the story is almost completely forgotten in the news.
Why? Because two days later, Charles Lindbergh has taxied off for his flight to Paris, and the world goes mad for Lindy. Schechter devotes many pages to Lindbergh’s history and flight, and it feels like padding. This book clocks out at over 300 pages, but the line spacing is generous, the page margins wide, and blank pages intersperse every chapter. This is frankly a much slighter book than it looks. There are lengthy litanies of dozens of sensational murders of the era having nothing to do with Michigan, Andrew Kehoe, psychology, or much else except that there were lots of murders in the papers those days (and these, of course). But this is what Harold Schechter does: write true-crime books. This one feels like an assemblage of clips from newspapers.com, collected by a dutiful research assistant, and assembled by Schechter. He adds little to these stitched-together snippets beyond his heavy-breathing “if only they had known,” “one unstable man’s implacable hatred,” and other such melodramatic commentary. He tries to make a case for crimes that capture the imagination and memory of a society because of what it fears most: Charles Manson as the drug-crazed hippy of the 60s, poisonings in an era when patent medicines were freely sold and toxins of all kinds dumped into waterways, and mass murders post 9/11. He doesn’t really succeed in fitting the Bath School Massacre into any such explanation: this was one damaged, furious, violent man who killed many dozens of innocents, yet was functional enough to be considered a “respected citizen” by some. It remains a horrifying puzzle, and other than the value of Schechter reminding us of this one terrible event that should be honored and remembered, Maniac does not do very much to explain it, or enlighten us.