Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - 19 Days | 8. I Wish I Was Sorry, But I’m Not

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

With the saga of the Austin serial bombings coming to a shocking conclusion, all that remains are questions. Now, over five years later, those deeply involved with these terrifying 19 days look back on what it all means to them -- as well as some who have never spoken publicly about what happened… until now. 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, Pixar. You hit him from behind. I heard the side doors open. And so at that point, I knew someone had gone out. And actually, I knew it was Rob because I heard his voice. I started getting out and I could see him

at the front passenger window, trying to breach it with his rifle. That's when the detonation happened. Just a bright flash. I see glass fly out from the front passenger window, and I just, I see my body drop just kind of fly out of frame. Everything is silent and everything was just super slow motion. I made my way up

to the front driver window area and I started to scan. Everything was just super smoky in there. I could see probably from kind of like his elbow-ish up and he was still sitting upright and his eyes were open. His head started to rotate towards me with his eyes open and I thought, oh shoot, this guy's still alive. And I ended up shooting him one time. He slumped over and all of a sudden, like everything came back.

We started backing away and kind of getting everyone back. I turned around and all of a sudden sudden Rob Nunes was standing there. I was like Where the hell did you come from? To clarify here the SWAT team member who tried to breach Condit's window and who Vincent Garcia had seen blown backwards by the blast He was also named Rob and despite being within a doorframe of an exploding pipe bomb He was more or less physically unharmed. As for Rob Nunez, Josh Oehus, and the rest of the bomb squad, they'd followed the SWAT

team to properly secure the scene and clear the car. We later find out that he actually had a pipe bomb with him. And once he saw that, you know, he was caught and the police were there, he detonated that pipe bomb right there in his lap. So we get the bomb truck there. We want to clear the vehicle. We take the robot down, we drive it around. It looks pretty consistent with what we had experienced

before with the other devices. I go up there and we kind of look around and the blast was like so powerful, it had like bent the steering wheel of the car forward. And there was blood and meat and like bone and everything everywhere, all over the inside of that car. So then we become concerned that Condit is sitting on something, sitting on a device. So we ended up setting up like a tarp and stuff.

We roped him, pulled him out from a distance away and he like fell onto the tarp and just looking at him there dead on the side of the road, he was just like, man, like all of this for this guy. Like, what is the problem? Like, why did you lash out at society so violently? What is the point? I could not find any value or meaning in his actions at all. I could not find any value or meaning in his actions at all. Even though the bomber had been caught, even though his terrorist raid had been brought to an end, Josh Oehus, Rob Nunez, and the others involved in the takedown walked away feeling haunted. The way we all do these days after one of these many distinctly American tragedies unfolds. What would possess a 23-year-old kid

to do something so horrific, so unspeakable? From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Pegalo Pictures, this is Witnessed, 19 Days. I'm your host, Sean Flynn. Part Eight, I wish I were sorry, but I'm not. The only thing I can even remotely compare it to was like when you're doing like hurricane coverage.

You know, when you're just on the clock till you're not and you have no end in sight. But you're doing it because it's important and because it matters to the people at home. News that law enforcement had found the Austin bomber, that they had tried to arrest Mark Anthony Condit, and that Condit was now dead, spread quickly. Yet after weeks of watching and waiting and reporting every new development, KVU Weed reporter Jason Puckett found out about it like everyone else. We'd reached the point in this on that night where our bosses who'd been seasoned and had done this enough,

they were not sleeping but they'd learned that they had to make some of their employees leave the newsrooms at certain point or else we wouldn't be able to cover things as things progress. I happened to be one of the ones who had been sent home that night. When I was so exhausted, I crashed. But what I woke up to was my roommate who who had been sent home that night. I was so exhausted I crashed. But what I woke up to was my roommate who was also in news, waking me up, jumping for joy, shaking me that he'd been caught and that he was dead and that it was over.

It was such an overwhelming sense of relief as an Austinite. First thing I did was call into my newsroom to be like, do I need to be in there? I'm getting up, I'm getting dressed, getting ready to run in there. No one's picking up, understandably, because it's mayhem in there. So I open up our app to see what's on air at that moment and it's my news director, Tim Ryan, who's a very calm collected man, not prone to being on camera, but he was on camera in that moment announcing that the bomber had been killed. I'm Tim Ryan. I'm the news director here at K-View.

And we have information from Tony Plohetsky, who works for K-View and the Austin American Statesman, confirmation that the suspect in these bombings is dead. Which was like a profound thing. You know, the news director going on air only happens if the station's done something incredibly wrong or if there is such profound news that the manager himself is like, I wanna report this, I don't want any backlash coming on anybody else at any point for the words that are chosen here.

I'm gonna take the responsibility of this one. They brought me back into the station to keep doing those verify things because once the name was released, my God, the misinformation went crazy. We did get this quote from an investigator. The hunt for the bomber was a race against time as law enforcement feared additional devices would continue to be exploded.

Now we have to go and work backwards to figure everything else out. With the immediate threat neutralized, to use the law enforcement word, investigators would be able to rewind a bit, to go back and sort out Condit's motive and methods. Of course, first they had to be sure that Condit was the only threat, which meant that over the previous day and night, while they were desperately searching for Condit,

authorities were also ensuring everyone else in his immediate orbit was under control. Here's Colin Thomas. I decided to walk to the library in town. On the way back, I still had that mentality in my mind. I'm like, oh God, I hope I don't step on something. I don't step on a tripwire. It could be anywhere because nobody knew.

That's the freaky thing about it. You know, we just assumed it was like some random individual, some crazy random individual or individuals making this stuff. And I start walking to the house. And all of a sudden, a guy, a tall guy wearing a cap, and he had a gun. He was like, FBI. So I just put my hands up. I didn't resist. I thought it was some kind of mistake or a joke. So I sit by the sidewalk and they detained me. And he's like, do you know what's going on?

Well, I know the city's on high alert. And he's like, okay, come with us. Stand up. It was getting crazier where they had more police officers coming in. And I was sitting in their suburban. They had me handcuffed. I was kind of sitting there, kind of feeling sorry for myself. And the only thing I'm thinking was, did Mark call the police on me? Because I'm thinking he accused me of something.

So maybe he was freaking out enough to actually be so neurotic enough to call the police on me, or call, you know. And I thought they were doing like a stop and search to everybody in Austin, random random individuals picking up people like, oh, you must be the person, you must be the person. So they asked me, this is where they asked me to draw out of the house and said, yeah, we're sending in the SWAT team in there.

And I'm like, oh, shit, dude, Alan's in there, holy crap. This was all happening late on March 20th into the early morning hours of March 21st. At that time, there were two very active scenes. One was the hotel lot in Round Rock, just north of Austin, where Condit's SUV was parked. The second was Condit's house in Pflugerville, where Colin Thomas and Alan, the other roommate, rented rooms. But as far as the authorities knew, that house was a bomb factory. The whole place could be booby-trapped, so extreme caution was critical. Rob Nunez, the chief of the bomb squad, and Josh Oyhus were at the first scene, preparing to take down Condit.

Jeff Joseph was at the house, preparing to clear it. So when we arrived at the staging point, there was a meeting, a big ol' circle of people standing around talking about what's gonna happen. Prior to that, the whole neighborhood had been locked down, really. It's the most bizarre thing that I may have ever seen was, had somebody still been at the residence, there was a threat. Well, that was no surprise whatsoever. And I think that may have been factored into the plan of the reason why it happened the way it did.

The armor from the DPS SWAT team goes and pulls the suspect vehicle away. They approach, they try as best they can clear the structure from the outside, right, to put minimal people at risk where possible. It was really shortly discovered that it was an empty building. Started driving our robot over, drove through the house and turned around the bedroom door of the bomber.

Used the robot, pushed the door open, drove forward. I ran into a guy's foot. I was like, what the hell's going on? The FBI guy was there. I was like, who the fuck is this guy in the house, right? They're like, I don't know. It might be the ATF bomb squad guy. That's insanely dangerous.

They're asking me to drive a robot in to check for tripwires, and there's a human being inside there. That's like pointing a gun at that guy's head. And so after I'd calmed down and got it out, the ATF bomb technician would go, he's like, man, I'm real sorry, I thought it was clear for us to enter at that point, so there's still, even at the end of this, a little bit of communication

problem happening there. From that point, it was just a matter of bomb tech after bomb tech going inside and taking x-rays and trying to figure out what all these items in the bomber's room are. Finally, a view inside Condit's bedroom, presumably the nerve center, the place where his 19-day bombing spree was planned and plotted. In his room, he had some ammonium nitrate mixtures that would have created high explosives. So with a pipe bomb you have to have a container for it to contain that pressure to explode. A high explosive, it doesn't need that container,

doesn't need that containment to be a lethal blast. So it looked like he was definitely making an intent to escalate his game even further. From simple devices to changing how they function slightly, to put them in the mail, to tripwires, all of this is like an escalating arch. He could take any form factor that he wanted from that point forward. And then also in there, he had a box

of where he had clearly been tinkering with how to make it remotely activated. So that is another pretty seismic shift from victim activated to command initiated. Also in there, he had a box that had all the receipts and all the packaging from every single thing that he had purchased to build these devices. Like, sacked up to almost a hand to investigators, it seemed like. Also in the box was the wig that he wore into the FedEx, the gloves, some rocks. So the earlier devices, he had weighed them down.

So it clearly, I thought, had gone into this, that he didn't want to rely on having to pick a rock up from the environment that he was in. He brought his own rocks to the scene with him. This mountain of physical evidence tying Condit to the bombings, all of it easily gathered in his room, certainly made it seem like Condit had no idea the authorities were onto him.

Was he really so brazen as to not cover his tracks? Or did he want to get caught? And meanwhile, Condit's roommate, Colin Thomas, had no idea what was happening. He was still in custody at the police station, isolated from the outside world. Nighttime roll around, the FBI transferred me over to police officers,

and the police officers took me downtown. This is where the DA, just the attorney and the detective, were both interrogating me about where, like, you know what I think about your roommate, this and that, and like, I don't know what's going on. One of the detectives was like, I've been up for three days straight now, part of the family, so if you know anything,

you better, you know, you gotta tell us. You think this is a joke? Like, you think this is, like, they were really, like, harping on my ass. They didn't tell me anything until later on. So the whole world knew before I even found out. We walked to the garage and he tells me, yeah, so we caught the guy, the bomber.

I was like, oh, thank God, that's good news. He was your roommate? Oh my fucking God. It's almost like your whole world is like, it's zapped. Like you just get shocked, like what? After the raid, Condit's other roommate, who we're calling Alan, was detained and questioned. Like Colin, he was released a short time later, which immediately raised an obvious question. How could these two roommates not have known, or at the very least suspected, that Condit

was building bombs for weeks in their little three-bedroom house. Here's Bomb Squad Sergeant Jeff Joseph. So I'm kind of on that line of a generation where that seems like the most insane thing that anybody could ever tell me, that something like that could be happening in a house and the other people that live there not have any clue about it. I guess it's possible. It just seems really improbable to me. And here's Joshua Hughes. I was surprised and am surprised that he did not have an accomplice or accomplices or somebody

training him, somebody helping him, teaching him. Just based on my experience, you know, we went after bomb factories when I was in the military and it's generally a network and people get training from somewhere. So I only know my small piece of the pie, the puzzle, right? There's probably a lot more to the puzzle that I'm not privy to. I can't get into investigative details right now. I can tell you that we're looking at any associates that the subject might have had to make sure this is singular in nature and there are other people that knew about this, but that continues.

That's Chris Combs, the FBI special agent in charge at a press conference a few hours after Condit was killed. They were interviewed numerous times. It's kind of hard to believe that guys building bombs in your house and you didn't notice it. Obviously in the beginning we felt they have to know, right? How could you not know? But there's a lot that goes into why they were never charged.

On his room it's padlocked. So nobody ever went in his room. Now one of them said in interviews, yeah, I would hear like power drills and he was in there doing something. I don't know what he was doing, but they didn't know. So it's not like he was building bombs in the living room or the dining room, right, where everybody would see it. They're not really friends.

They're just kind of shack and up together, just three random guys. And I was skeptical myself. I was like, wait a minute, how are we not charging anybody else in this house? Like, that doesn't make sense. But through the numerous interviews that they all did, and when you look at it all, it's very plausible that they had absolutely no knowledge as to what that guy was doing. Now, if you're Colin Thomas, this isn't complicated. People like, how did you not know?

Here's my answer to that question. I didn't know because I had no care what he was doing in his own life. In a sense, I was so focused on my own life that I'm paying rent, I'm not going to go ask him about his personal life. It's a business transaction first and foremost. And Mark is representing his father who owns the house. And to add to that, I always ask people, well, do you know what your neighbors are doing next door?

People only show you what they want you to see. No one knows what your next door neighbor is doing. Nobody knows. So my first call is right there on the top shelf. I've had others over the years, but that's my first and my favorite. I'm reporter Ali Jarmaning, host of the new season of WBUR's Last Scene. I'm digging into what happened at Harvard Medical School, how body parts were stolen and sold across the country.

In this five-part series, I spend time with those who buy and sell human remains, and I ask, how should we treat the dead? Listen and follow Last Seen wherever you get your podcasts. A $6 billion con. It didn't take long for it to spread like wildfire. You got to take a look at this really crazy gold stock. A buddy of mine got in at a dime. Which destroyed lives and devastated communities.

Every little town across the nation, people have shares in this. We lost everything. And to date, no one has been brought to justice. Somebody knows more than we know. The $6 billion gold scam from the BBC World Service and CBC. Search for the $6 billion gold scam wherever you get your podcasts. Mark Anthony Condit had slipped the net. In the early hours of March 21st, there were cops staking at his house.

Hundreds more were searching for him all over central Texas. But he was gone. The cops had no idea where he was or where he was going. Until he turned on his phone. His phone pinged a cell tower, and that led police right to him in that hotel parking lot. And maybe Condit knew that would happen, because the reason he turned down his phone

was to record a 25-minute soliloquy about the how and the why of his bombing spree. A few details about that recording would be released by law enforcement hours later. One of the things that Mark Condit said is, I wish I was sorry, but I am not. Condit described himself as a psychopath and said he feels as though he had been disturbed

since his childhood. To law enforcement authorities, Condit's recording was a clear-cut, case-closed confession to all of the bombings. They called it a manifesto, which would seem to give it an intellectual depth that a bomber's ramblings probably don't deserve, but we'll have to take their word for it. As of today, six years after the fact, officials have never released the recording or even a transcript. They're worried about copycats and about broadcasting the message of a domestic terrorist.

Of course, those closest to the case, like Rob Nunez and others on Austin's bomb squad and at the FBI, they have heard the recording. I have heard it, and it's cut and clear that it was him. He did it, and he was alone. He never gave any indication for any ideology or anything like that. He was a true serial killer. He had hardly any emotion about what he did. He just didn't care.

That's Chris Combs take on it too. So in that confession, he walks through each one of the bombings. He says during the video that he chose everybody randomly, that he's just a psychopath. He loves killing people. He loves explosives. And he said, I don't know why, but I just love killing people. So there is no motive. There's no motive at all. It was completely random. And he talks about his future plans of other bombings.

So there's no question we stopped future bombings that frankly, he was going to increase his ferocity and body count. And then he was talking about just giving up and moving away so that we could never catch him. But he does describe in that video that as soon as he talked to the roommate and he heard about the ambulance, he knew the FBI was on to him. Jeff Joseph, the bomb squad sergeant, he also heard it. He pretty much asked the question,

why did I do it in a rhetorical manner? And he's like that he's psychotic. That was his response to himself. And then he starts rambling a little bit that he feels like he's always been that way and that he would maybe at some point he would stop and switch to shooting people. He would watch the news about bombings happening and he'd be like,

man, why aren't the cops getting that guy? And then he'd be like, oh, that's right, that's because that's me. I don't know anything about psychology, but to me, if somebody says that they take offense to what they're seeing that's happening and they're like, oh, that's me, I don't think that they're maybe quite as detached as they think they are. I think it boils down to maybe just being evil. As a motive, being evil is both comforting and chilling all at once. Comforting because it accounts for everything. There's no messy details to sort through, no nature versus nurture. Just a basic immutable flaw, a glitch in the bad guy's wiring. And yet it's chilling because it explains nothing. Evil describes Condit's specific

acts, and maybe it even describes him. But where does that evil come from? Because before March of 2018, there was nothing to suggest it was lurking in Condit. Condit had no criminal record. He'd never been in any kind of trouble. He was the eldest of three children in a solidly middle-class religious family. The kids were homeschooled, and after graduating from homeschool high school, Condit went to Austin Community College for a couple of years. Then he got a job at a semiconductor company. He was let go because of restructuring, and by

early 2018 he was reportedly working at a garage door company, which is where he apparently sourced many of the supplies he needed to build his bombs. Except for that part, the bombs. He was thoroughly unremarkable. Extended family members, friends, neighbors, they all remember him as quiet, polite, kind. And then, for reasons no one understands, he murdered two people, maimed five, and terrorized a major American city for 19 days. Except, we don't like not understanding. That's human nature. So when there's no obvious answer, we look for hints, for clues.

We sift through the ashes for fragments that we can dust off and analyze. For instance, there was this antiquated and frankly unfounded theory about Condit's core motive, which was repeated with varying degrees of confidence by many different people we interviewed, from law enforcement to members of the press to locals in Austin,

a theory still repeated more than five years after the bombings. One night in 2017, Colin Thomas remembers he was playing video games with Condit in the living room of that little house. So Mark told me he was gay one night. And this was after I had brought up one of the famous singers, Demi Lovato,

because I thought she was cute. I couldn't really tell what he was into. I was like, hey, you like her? Not that it really mattered, that's his business, but he told me he was gay. And then my reaction was, oh, okay, yeah, cool. I didn't see a big deal for him to admit that. I don't even know if it's entirely true either.

That's what I want to emphasize, because he wrote an article against, you know, counteracts to that. That's true. Almost six years earlier, in May 2012, Condit wrote a blog post called Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal. He wrote, in part, homosexuality is not natural. It's not natural to couple male with male and female to female. It would be like trying to fit two screws together and two nuts together and then saying,

see, it's natural for them to go together. It also came out, after he was dead, that Condit had a Grindr account, which made quite a few headlines. The theory here, such as it is, seems to be that Condit's sexuality was in such conflict with his religious upbringing that maybe he feared harsh judgment from those closest to him. In that, the theory seemed to go, that fear of being ostracized, or maybe self-loathing, convinced Condit that he should murder strangers. Not just murder, but to calmly, meticulously, with a great amount of planning and technical skill, build and distribute explosives over a period of weeks.

That does not seem plausible. Also, there's no evidence to support it. So we're back to where we started. ["Dark Night"] Dark Knight had a quote. Some men just want to watch the world burn, right? So I think that's that. He just wanted to see how far he can go until he got caught. And I think he was trying to just, you know, some men just want to watch the world burn, right? So I think that's that he just wanted to see how far he can go until he got caught. And I think he was trying to just, you know,

do this until they finally caught him. And when they caught him, he blew himself up so nobody can catch him, I guess. The truth is, no one knows why he did it, or why he targeted his victims, or even if he did target them, in a way that was Condit's final act of terror, leaving all of those questions that will never be answered. Hi, I'm Christy Lee, the creator of Canadian True Crime. Join me for an immersive deep dive into some of the most thought-provoking true crime cases in Canada. Using facts curated from court documents, inquiry reports, and news archives, I carefully

unravel and analyze each case, exposing the pitfalls of the criminal justice system that everyone needs to know about. Find Canadian True Crime wherever you listen to podcasts or visit canadiantruecrime.ca. Do you ever wonder how celebrities order food? Like is Sarah Paulson a diet coke or a regular coke girlie? Some peasant coke? No. Or how does Sofia Vergara order a pizza? No, no, no tomatoes. I cannot eat tomatoes. Are you killed with mushrooms? Not really.

If these are the details you need, and I know you do, I have the podcast for you. I'm Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and on my podcast, Dinner's on Me, I take some notable friends of mine out to dinners in Los Angeles and New York City. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. That thing was delicious. I think the most common thought that enters my brain,

especially as I get older, is the sort of concern over the victim's legacy in this. People think back on the Austin serial bombing and it's still about Mark Anthony Condon, who he was and what led to this. And that's going to be fascinating. I don't blame people for that inclination, but I wish there was also a push to equally maybe remember the folks who were killed by this or wounded by this.

I particularly often think of Stefan House because I remember just how he was the true first victim and the coverage was so wrong and the response to it was so wrong and sort of almost to a point where he was almost mildly vilified and that's heartbreaking. Jason Puckett is right. The victims are almost always overshadowed by the villains.

It's like they become footnotes or half-remembered extras in someone else's show. Sometimes, a lot of times, that's what they prefer, to be left alone. We reached out to the survivors, to the family and friends of the dead, but few of them wanted to talk, wanted to relieve that horror all these years later. As one father told us, they've moved on with their lives. But Mark Mason, the father of Draelyn Mason, the 17-year-old musical prodigy who was killed after stepping between his mother and the second package bomb, he did want to talk. And for the first time. Our producers sat down with him at a coffee shop near his home in

Pflugerville, coincidentally just a few blocks from where Marc Conde once lived, where he built the bomb that killed Drelin. Drelin was a happy kid. He was a happy kid. He, you know, he had fun. That's what he was supposed to do. He was a kid. As his dad, I just wanted him to be a grown man.

I think all fathers want that. You just want your kids to be grown and responsible and take care of themselves and all the rest of that. Draven was a heck of a musician. Where did that come from, do you think? Came from me. Studied piano, I studied guitar, I studied saxophone. And I think, I wanna say he got it from me, but you know, all kids, they are who they are.

But the nuance is that I think he felt better as a teacher. I think Dragan loved to teach his crap. He gets that from his grandfather and his grandmother. And as his father, I wanted him to be the best man he could possibly be. He died at 17. Nobody knows in the fuck what they wanna do at 17. Nobody knows in the fuck what they want to do at 17. Drelin was a talented kid.

I know he was gifted when he put the violin in his hand. He started with the violin, went to the cello, and next thing you know, we have this double bass. And then he thought he was extra sexy cool with the bass in his hands. He was a great giver and a great person. It's been five years. You know, you'll never get over it, right?

You'll never... Like I said, I hate when people say it's gonna be a new fucking normal art, some bullshit. It gets more manageable. I say that to anybody who's lost anybody close to them. It'll never be normal, but it gets more manageable. It wasn't just Drelin. There were five other victims here, and all of them have a significant relevance.

There was a child loss. There was a young man lost. Freddie Dixon and Melanie Dixon's son was lost. Drelin is not alone. And then Mark Mason reveals a truly bizarre coincidence. And that's all it is, a coincidence, which is a connection between the first three bombings, himself.

It's the freakiest thing I've ever been involved in. I knew Freddie. I knew Melanie. I knew Joey. I'm Miss S. Ross' son. I know Freddie Dixon. He was my pastor for my whole life. I knew Joey. We worked together for 10 years at the comptroller's office, right? To fully clarify what Mark Mason is talking about here, Freddie Dixon, Mark Mason's pastor his whole life, was Anthony Steffen House's stepfather.

Mark worked at the State Comptroller's office with Joey, Esperanza Herrara's son, for more than a decade. And of course his own son, Drelin, who was killed by the second bombing. This is gonna sound harsh and fucked up, but I'm kinda glad the motherfucker took his own life, right? He saved us from going to court, or saved us from years of juries and trials

and all the rest of that old shit. I don't need to know your explanation. What happened, happened. I don't blame his parents. They're victims in this as well, right? They're victims too, in this. I don't hold any ill will to them. Did the city respond accordingly?

Who the fuck knows? Could they have done better? Yes. Could anybody, and I say that to say, could anybody have done better under the circumstances? Highest I'd be in 2020, everybody could have done better, right? And so I don't dwell. I just keep on moving. Keep moving forward. That's what Mark Mason has done. And that's what the city of Austin has done.

But there are still scars. Here's Jason Puckett. It felt like Austin had sort of lost something in the short term after this had happened. It didn't have the same safety and sort of naivety and just overall feeling of just like enthusiastic life that the city had often had until that. I always loved bringing people to visit Austin to just like take them down the greenway or something or take them over to like even like Zilker Park just to walk around and see people living because I was loved that Compared to so many other cities people are just out there having fun. They're living their lives They're out there with their families and their pets, you know, they're they're on the river. They're they're getting drunk on 6th Street

You know, whatever they're doing it did feel like This even once it was passed and people finally could have some semblance of safety, that it had sort of stomped on that a little bit. That one person, through crazy actions, can just alter a city and that many people in such a profound way, it doesn't seem right. These rare and spectacular crimes, they're like pivot points, signposts that mark a before and an after in a city's collective psyche. Austin was not a place that could be terrorized by a lone bomber. Until it was. Now, it's not like people tiptoe around scanning for tripwires. But the memory is still there.

It's not paranoia. It's a memory. But one that shifts your idea of what's possible. It's a memory, but one that shifts your idea of what's possible. Josh Oyhus has since left the Austin Police Department. He moved to Colorado to work with local fire departments and first responders. He's had time to ponder, to put those 19 days in perspective. I didn't really think about it in great depth or in detail until a few years later. I don't think it's a one-off. I think it's something that could have happened in any city. It could still happen in any city.

It's bordering on like a complex coordinated attack type thing. And it's very hard for law enforcement, public safety to respond and and deal with those types of situations. I think it's a symptom of the mental health crisis in America. In America, there's just not enough resources. I travel a lot and there's parts of the country where, especially more rural parts of the country, where you can't even get access to like a counselor or psychologist or anything like that. It's definitely not something that is prioritized in our culture.

And because of that, I think we're able to easily disassociate from pain or from someone else's pain. And, you know, if it gives you a thrill like content seemed to get a thrill out of hurting defenseless people, you just have no empathy and no way of understanding like those people's lives are changed forever. It's definitely something that people need to fight against. And really, even in Austin, it wasn't long before the news cycle kind of wiped that out and we were on to the next thing. In the 1970s, John Todd burst onto the evangelical scene with a shocking tale. He claimed to be a former witch, involved in a then unheard of secret organisation called the Illuminati,

and urged Christians to prepare for a violent world takeover. First of all, the number one weapon in everybody's home should be a 12 gauge pump shotgun. Hear the amazing story of one of the originators of the modern day conspiracy theory. From Magnificent Noise and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Cover Up, the Conspiracy Tapes. 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 me, Sean Flynn.

Co-produced by Brian Haas. And co-produced by David Loeffler. Written by Eli Korus. Edited and assembled by Joshua Schaeffer. Original series theme by Kevin Ignatius of DOS Tapes. Interviews recorded by Nicholas Sinakis, Eli Korus, and Alvin Cowan. Sound mix by Craig Placky. Production legal by Sean Fossett 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.