Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - 19 Days | 5. Break

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

A day after the fourth bomb detonates, a fifth bomb explodes – this time at a FedEx sorting facility just outside of Austin. Two more bombs are discovered at other shipping facilities in the Central Texas area. Diffusing these bombs leads to a major break in the investigation. From Campside Media, Pegalo Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Season 6 of Witnessed: 19 Days Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: 19 Days, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed: 19 Days show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts and @campside_media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast contains descriptions of violence and harsh language. Listener discretion is advised. Campsite Media Hello, pictures. Good morning, George. It's been about 48 hours since that package exploded on this block. Authorities are asking for the public's help. There's now a $65,000 reward for any information

leading to an arrest. Tips came in, but none of them, frankly, led us to the bomber. And you always discuss that. When you start a tip line, you know 99% of them are not going to work. 90% of them frankly are people who call you because they can see the future or they had a dream. You get a lot of calls that just, you know, unfortunately waste time. There's a lot of psychics out there who jump in and want to help. But you have to take everything serious because you never know what's the real one, right? So you know you're going to suck up a lot of manpower for a limited return, but there's usually one or two kernels in there that lead you down a path, so it's worth it, right? So it's that needle in the haystack.

The reward money that is now available is $100,000 for a tip that leads Unfortunately on this none of those panned out But there's hundreds coming in you got to chase down every one of them. You got agents running around You actually go out and you have to interview the psychics You're still doing neighborhood canvases it just takes a lot of time and it's just real manpower intensive. 18 days, four bombings, two dead. And this is what it's come to.

And again, we would ask you to call the tip line. If you have a tip, please call us. That's police chief Brian Manley at a press conference. Publicly, investigators were trying to bribe someone into ratting out the bomber, or bombers. But think about that for a second. If you knew who was terrorizing a major American city, would you wait to say something until the payday got high enough? Of course not.

And in any case, it didn't work. Just over 24 hours after the fourth bombing, on March 20th, 2018, a small box was moving through a FedEx sorting facility in a town called Shirts, about 60 miles south of Austin. It moved from one set of rollers to another, and then another, and then it blew up. The FEDEX facility has all these conveyors, you know, transporting packages around, you know, sorting where the packages are going. Well, on one of the high conveyor belts, at some point, this package just detonates. They later find out that it's one of these sorting arms that whacked the package that caused it to function.

Caused it to function. In other words, made it explode. That package was a bomb, one presumably built by the same person or people who'd built the previous four bombs terrorizing Austin. It was also, presumably, not intended to explode on a FedEx conveyor belt. It was meant to be delivered, and it was meant to kill people. That it blew up early was an accident, an unforced error, and the break that could finally put investigators on the right track.

It is the big break, frankly. When the FedEx bomb goes off down in Shirts, south of Austin, we roll in on that. FedEx is a great corporate partner. It's a billion dollar company. Their technology is amazing. They track every single package. We walked in. They said to us, here's the video of the package three seconds before it blew up. Here's a picture of the address label.

We have the area contained, you have all your evidence is in this one room. By the way, we have tracked it back to who mailed the package. Here's the video of the individual who mailed the package. So they track it back to a FedEx location that was here in Austin. As they're going through this investigative process, they're able to collect photos, videos,

and they find the person and they get him on video actually bringing this package into FedEx to the FedEx location to mail this package out. Not only do they see him mailing this packages, they find out that he's mailed out two packages at the same time. In a rare break for law enforcement, the malfunctioning of this package bomb put them, maybe not ahead of the bomber, but right alongside them.

The challenge now was finding that second package before it reached its final destination. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media and Pegalo Pictures, this is Witnessed, 19 Days. I'm your host, Sean Flynn. Part Five. Break. We begin with breaking news. Reports of an explosion at the FedEx ground facility in Shirts.

One person was injured. A law enforcement source says it appears a package was mailed from Austin, and it was also due to be delivered to Austin. Right now there is urgent work to figure out if that explosion is connected to a series of bombings. It was a powerful explosion caused by a tripwire that injured two men in their 20s. Somewhere around four or five in the morning,

we get a call from the guys in San Antonio, say, hey, there's another package out there. We don't know where it is yet, but it was addressed to go to this location in Austin. Myself and a couple other guys with a clearance team were sent to that address. And the location that I went to is actually a church. You know, we don't know the timelines of what's going on.

We don't know if this bomber could be there. So, you know, as they approach to this church... ... Cars are blacked out. There's no headlights. You know, we're trying to sneak in. A lot of stuff going on, right? We see cars in the parking lot that appear to be abandoned, but they're kind of in the middle of nowhere.

So the approach to this was kind of strange. Kind of the intensity level is pretty high. We have some canines with us, but again, we're concerned about tripwires. So we have to kind of bounce back and forth between before we approach with the canine, we have to clear the area of tripwires, use some night vision here and there, and then as we're doing this then a jogger comes down the sidewalk. Well we know the jogger came from there so there's no tripwires there. A little dark humor.

You take the levity where you find it. But the moment doesn't last. About the time we get that finished, my counterpart from the FBI, as I'm pulling out of that church parking lot, calls me up on the phone. He goes, get to FedEx in Austin at their sorting facility down on McKinney Falls. They have the other package there. Get there now. So we jump on the highway, fly down there, we're calling in more units to respond. On the way, Rob calls Jeff Joseph.

The PGA Players Club was kicking off that morning. So I was there at three whatever in the morning sweeping a golf course and Rob gives us a call. He's like, hey, immediately get to FedEx, because they think they found a package there. As I pull into the FedEx facility, they already have evacuations in the process. I make immediate contact with the manager. You know, I ask him if he knows what's going on.

He goes, yeah, yeah, I have the package. Cool, where's that? He goes, I picked it up and put it on this cart. You know, I'm thinking to myself, oh shit, you're a lucky guy, right? This is your lucky day, because the thing didn't go off. We get to the door, he says, yeah, three bays down on this blue cart,

that's where the other package is. Jeff Joseph arrived moments later. The two of them, Jeff and Rob, stared down the package from a safe distance. This is a big deal. This is an unexploded device that we have an opportunity to begin with, make sure that nobody gets hurt by it, but we get to mitigate it in a way where we control every piece of evidence that is collected out of it, which is priceless. So Rob and I came up with a plan that I would go in and take an x-ray of it so that if our activities caused it to function,

that we would have evidence of it and how it was constructed. Ordinarily, you would use a remote means to do that, whether that's with a robot or by rigging. Remote is always better, but it would be almost impossible to get the robot to do what we needed it to do. So I suited up. Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the tropics. But she soon discovers

that paradise has its secrets. I'm Alice Levine and this is The Price of Paradise, the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption and murder. Wish you were here? Follow The Price of Paradise now wherever you listen to podcasts. Local and federal authorities have been at this FedEx ground shipping center you see behind me here in southeast Austin all day long, all because of a suspicious package that is connected, we're told, to that one in shirts that exploded overnight. With the discovery of an unexploded package bomb at a FedEx facility in Austin, the bomb squad

now had an opportunity, a rare one, to collect a wealth of evidence. All they had to do was dismantle the bomb without setting it off. So bomb squad tech Jeff Joseph donned the heavy, cumbersome bomb disposal suit and slowly made his way toward the package. heavy cumbersome bomb disposal suit and slowly made his way toward the package.

It's a weird kind of range of thoughts that go through your head. One, you're like, oh, this is super scary. And two, this is super exciting because I get to do every single thing that I've been trained to do all at the same time. And then three, Jesus, what's the... This is scary again.

But as soon as you lay eyes on it, you're getting kind of a hyper-focused state. In the bomb tech world, like, right before a bomb technician goes downrange, they regurgitate their plan. I'm gonna go down, I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this. If I see this, I'm gonna come back

and I'm not gonna do anything. So there's all those pre-laid plans that are explicitly laid out so that there's no confusion because as soon as you close the visor and that thing, I think your IQ points go down by like 40 points or so. So when I got around the corner and saw the package, I was like, oh, okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. And I had all the tools there and I just went about taking care of the task. So first task was place

an x-ray panel and I had to get the x-ray source since like a machine that's big and heavy and get it aimed so it's directional. It can be super far away, but the panel needs to be as close to without touching. That's kind of the goal, and that's exactly what I did. So I got everything placed and took the x-ray. And from that x-ray, we were able to determine, yes, this is a bomb, this is a device, and it's intact. From there, we sent in a robot, our standard EOD response, right?

We use a robot to get in a better position, right? We take a second X-ray to get a better idea of what's inside, right? And then we kind of develop some procedures to disrupt this device and break it apart without it actually exploding. Disrupt is actually a term of art for bomb techs, and doing it involves a device called, seriously, a disruptor. They come in different shapes and sizes, but mostly they're a nozzle mounted on a tripod.

They're basically water cannons or really water snipers. They squirt highly pressurized, highly accurate bursts of water to strip away pieces of water cannons, or really water snipers. They squirt highly pressurized, highly accurate bursts of water to strip away pieces of an explosive device without ideally making it blow up. But of course, the Austin bomb techs were prepared for that as well.

So we started building up a bunch of protective works with kitty litter and pallets and a bunch of different stuff, kind of creating like a catcher's mitt for a bomb. And our intent was to eject the device out of the container that it was in, so we wanted to have that pipe bomb out by itself. So we set up two devices to accomplish that. Went over what we thought would happen,

over and over and over and over, like 17 million times. And then finally we're like, yep, let's go do that. One of the disruptors stripped away the outer package, and then we used a second disruptor to break open the pipe bomb. We were able to do all that without the actual device detonating. Went back in, and I couldn't have walked in and put it down with my hands

in any better of a position than how it just happened to land. So everything worked, like, perfect. Like, it could not have gone any better. So we had an intact pipe bomb there. We could see everything that could cause it to function. It was perfect. Josh Oyhus watched every burst from the disruptor. He wasn't officially working. In fact, he was supposed to be home in bed.

But after chasing shadows for 18 days, no way he was gonna miss this. I was sleeping in the guest room to not disturb my family. And my wife comes in and she's like, wake up, he did it again. I was like, what? Another bomb went off. So I was like, okay, so I jump up and Rob and Jeff are at the FedEx facility to start working their magic.

So I begged Sergeant Dwyer on the phone. I was like, please let me come, please, please, please. Even though I'm totally useless to you at this scene, I want to be there. Rob and Jeff put on a master class of how it's done, how you do business. Literally, they did it perfectly and they were creative, you know, and they were able to capture evidence, get incredible X-rays. I think they did some heroic stuff,

and I wrote them up for awards after that, just because I thought I was so impressed. Rob and Jeff had successfully neutralized the sixth bomb. By doing so, they almost certainly saved someone, or a lot of someone's, from being injured or killed. They'd also collected a mountain of evidence. The bomb itself, sure, but also the box in which it was packaged. That box would have been destroyed had the bomb functioned as intended, or if Rob and Jeff had been less precise. But left intact, it was the key to, well, everything. FedEx knew exactly where that package was shipped from,

a FedEx store in Sunset Valley, a little enclave in Southwest Austin. We went to the FedEx store the next morning when they opened the store, and Austin police, uh, with, with FBI interviewed the guy that took the packages from the bomber, Chris Combs, the FBI special agent in charge. So we interviewed him, got great detail from him. You know, Hey, the guy was obviously wearing a wig.

He had, uh, you know, hat really pulled down over his eyes. He was wearing gloves. No one was surprised that the bomber wore a disguise. He had a hat really pulled down over his eyes. He was wearing gloves. No one was surprised that the bomber wore a disguise. It would have been weird if he didn't. And then he says to us, you know, and he smelled funny. What does that mean? Well, he smelled like chemicals.

Well, there's a hint, right? And then it's funny, at the end of every FBI interview, we're all trained this, at the end of the interview You always say is there anything else you want to tell me? Is there anything you think is important that I haven't asked right? You always do that because most of the time you'll get something, right? So the guys ask him. Hey, is there anything else you want to tell us? Is there anything we haven't asked? And he goes well, you want me to tell you about his car There's kind of like what like what did he just say? is there anything we haven't asked? And he goes, well, you want me to tell you about his car?

And he was kind of like, what? Like, what did he just say? And he was like, well, you know, when he left, he was so weird. I kind of followed him and I was watching out the window. I saw him get into a red truck. We're like, yeah, that's important. We would really like to talk about that.

So the guy at the FedEx, you know, describes, you know, hey, he didn't park in front of the building. He parked in a number of stores down. He got into, you know, a red truck. I'm not exactly sure what the red truck was, but it's red. Now we're off to the races. So the Austin serial bomber drove a red pickup truck. Maybe that's not the most precise clue, but in the right hands, it's everything. The right hands would be the Austin PD's Tactical Intelligence Unit, the officers whose job is to keep tabs on bad guys.

Here's Jim Zapien, a member of the TAC Intel Unit who'd been working the bomber case. So we are all deputized US Marshals, and we pretty much locate and apprehend violent fugitives in central Texas. The worst of theitives in central Texas. The worst of the worst in central Texas. We run 17 counties around the city of Austin. So if they're in our area of responsibility, we'll go locate them and apprehend them.

And that's the way we're set up. When APD needs us, they'll call us for assistance. So like if a homicide dropped now, two of us would automatically respond to the homicide office. And as they would start collecting information and maybe get suspects, we would start doing research and intel

on whatever suspects they had. It's a lot of in the field, a lot of surveillance. My desk can be a minivan. We drive all drives on undercover vehicles. So I'll be in my van doing research on a target and I could be in Colleen doing surveillance while I'm doing the research on a different target. And then once we get an eyes on,

we have about 20 to 24 guys on our team, actual team. So that's how we work. We could have guys all over, you know, the 17 counties, but once we get eyes on, we're all converging on that one. We'll take care of that, wrap it up, and then we'll go back to the cases we're working. So we're always working a case. The TAC Intel unit had been working the bombings from the beginning, once Anthony Steffenhaus and Draelyn Mason were declared victims of homicide.

On the Mason home, I actually got called to the scene. And my job was to walk the crowd, take pictures and video of all the people in the crowd just in case, you know, you know, some of these guys will stick around and see What our approach was and see what we're doing and see it how the scene is We're hoping that maybe we had someone proud of his work, I guess We were just hoping we find get lucky and have someone in the crowd and while I was doing this Probably about 45 50 minutes and the third bomb went off And probably about 45-50 minutes in, the third bomb went off. And then that's when you kind of knew what the hell was going on, because they all were kind of the same type of bomb. TAC Intel, like everyone else, was chasing hunches and long shots.

Ghosts. I think everyone just wanted to do a good job, but it was just, we were constantly spinning our wheels at different, you know, places that we were looking. We had a good amount of people that were under heavy surveillance, but no one that we could do anything actionable with. It was 24 hours a day and we were just following around, seeing their pattern of life, you know, seeing that they purchased the kind of stuff that we were looking at, seeing that

they always were going out with, you know, seeing that they purchased the kind of stuff that we were looking at, seeing that they always were going out with, you know, boxes. The ultimate feeling was frustration that we had nothing. Until finally, a FedEx clerk took two packages from a smelly man in a blonde wig and white gloves, and then watched him climb into a red pickup. Here's Chris Combs. So, you know, you can pull video with a parking lot. Now you see him in the red truck. So now we got something, right? So we don't know who the guy is. And of course you never get a license plate on video.

You could have a hundred cameras, they're never gonna see the license plate every time. Never works, it's not that easy. So we don't have a license plate, but we know, you know, it's a forward red truck. So now you go to the state police and I want to know everybody driving a red forward truck within 200 miles of Austin. Identifying the truck, we have a lot of programs. You know, there's a lot of traffic cameras around. So we'll go through whatever program we have to identify vehicles through different camera systems in the city.

And maybe we'll run that make and model truck and it'll tell us every make and model that went through that camera system. But this is Texas after all, and a red pickup truck and exactly a unicorn. So off of TAC Intel search, a list was generated with about a thousand names on it. Now you got a list. Probably a thousand people driving that truck, but at least I know one of those thousand is my guy.

And now you're digging through that. But what it also allows you to do is you go through all your other witness statements. And there was a witness at the third bombing who said, you know, I saw like this weird red truck. So, all right, now you can go back. Now we dig out everything on that. Where's the video?

Video from buses driving by and delivery vans. You know, you got something to go on. And then you get that list. And so it went. A list of a thousand names became a list of a hundred names, then a hundred down to a dozen. And this is where the evidence collected by the bomb squad came into play. And now you can compare those names on the list to all the names that you got of everybody

buying batteries and everybody buying wire and anybody buying a piece of pipe. So now you just you bring in all this Intel you've been collecting for all these days and it's a massive amount. And you start comparing that to the literally hundreds of subpoenas you've issued to Home Depot and Radio Shack and Rays Electronics. And frankly, it's done by people. It's not done by computers. You watch TV and you think you throw all this into a computer and in 10 seconds you get

a name. That doesn't work like that. And then, you know, you go to all these stores and you say, who do you have that bought this piece? One of the analysts saw a name on the DMV list, and then she went over to all these records that ATF, FBI were pulling from all these different stores and said, hey, I think I saw that name. Like this woman's a genius, right?

That analyst's name is Jordana Nesvog, one of the many unsung heroes responsible for zeroing in on the serial bomber. She saw a name four days ago and she remembered it. And then she looks and she's like, that guy bought that piece of that explosive device and he's got a red truck. So then we get a video back from Home Depot that shows this guy driving a red truck came into a store and bought this piece that was related to one of the bombs.

And now, now we got you. Now we're really onto something big here. The video from Home Depot shows a young white male with short dark hair entering the store. He's wearing a black t-shirt and faded black jeans. He stops to talk with the greeter at the door. He's asking where to find certain things. Then he proceeds into the store, where he picks up a red sign reading,

Drive like your kids live here. The exact same sign used in the tripwire explosion. And a pack of white gloves. Identical to the gloves worn by the man who dropped off the two packages at the Sunset Valley FedEx location. The video continues, shows the man paying for his sign and his gloves and then leaving, going out to the parking lot, where he gets into a red pickup. The name on the receipt from that purchase, the man that appeared in that video, Mark

Anthony Condit. And now, now it's game on. So the biggest concern, you got a guy who's building bombs. How many more is he built? Is he booby trapped? Is his house booby trapped? So this isn't a simple arrest. So there are a lot of discussions about safety of law enforcement and the public. I arrived. We did a search. There's like a literal blood trail through the building back to where the detonation occurred.

Marcus is kind of cold. Did he start off evil? I don't think he did. But he turned evil. That's next time on Witnessed 19 Days. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of Witness 19 Days ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Just click Subscribe at the top of the Witness show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts.

As a subscriber, you'll get Binge access to news stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or GetTheBinge.com to learn more. This episode of Witnessed! 19 Days was reported and produced by Eli Korus and Joshua Schaeffer of Pegalo Pictures and Alvin Cowan. Executive produced by Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and Matthew Scherr of Campside Media. Hosted and co-produced by me, Sean Flynn, co-produced by Brian Haas, and co-produced by David Leffler.

Written by Joshua Schaeffer. Edited by Joshua Schaeffer with episode assembly by Kristi William Schaeffer. Original series theme by Kevin Ignatius of Doss Tapes. Interviews recorded by Nicholas Sinakis, Eli Korres, and Alvin Cowan. Sound mix by Craig Placky. Production legal by Sean Fawcett of Raymond Legal PC. And fair use legal by Sarah Burns and Diana Palacios of Davis Wright Tremaine. If you'd like to donate to the Draylen Mason Fellows Program, which helps young, up-and-coming musicians in Austin, you can do so by visiting austinsoundwaves.org. Please rate and leave us a review if you like what you've heard,

and thanks again for listening.