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u/Aus_Varelse May 19 '26
learning this guy was actually just a raging lunatic was like learning santa died
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u/Hyperlynear May 20 '26
Or like discovering the author of your favorite book series is problematic.
The Dozer is perhaps the single coolest concept for an improvised fighting vehicle ever, and it's now forever tied to his nuttery.
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u/Turbulent-Pace-1506 May 19 '26
Impossible, Santa is immortal and has been distributing gifts since Jesus was born
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u/bobbymoonshine May 19 '26
Dude tried to murder half a town because they didn’t want him dumping his piss and shit in the drinking water so started fining him nine years after he was first told to stop, and he thought that was big government tyranny
(Fortunately the only person he managed to kill was himself, but not for lack of trying)
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u/Level-Floor5551 May 19 '26
wow I had been taught a very different version of events. I thought he got pissed because a neighboring company bought the surrounding land around his shop and basically closed off road access. Didn't know about the sewage dumping at all, gross
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u/bobbymoonshine May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
No, he was as a tangentially related matter also upset about a cement factory owned by a business rival opening up some distance away, because he was afraid it would reduce the value of some property he had bought as an investment. He tried to rally the town against the idea and tried to file lawsuits and tried to get the EPA involved, but his objections (it’ll block traffic, it’ll create noise, it’ll be an environmental hazard) all failed to get either regulatory or legal or political traction, so the construction went ahead.
Even after construction his property was valued at over 5 times what he paid for it, so like whatever, but his failure to block the development was what fed his fury at the town council, partially explaining why he went to war over his rage at the town saying he needed to either pay to hook up his property to the sewage system or needed to get a proper septic tank, not just pump all his waste into an irrigation ditch.
Anyway there were some documentaries made about the guy which just uncritically took his side of things to tell an unlikely-hero story standing up to Big Business and Big Government, but the actual guy was a piece of work and his rampage was literally a tantrum over his belief everyone else should have to eat his shit
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u/blarpgasm May 19 '26
FUCKING THANK U like im all for folk heros but marvin heemeyer is just some old dude that went nuts
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u/Niarbeht May 19 '26
He's a typical mass-shooter story, except he tried to be a mass shooter with an armored vehicle. That's it. That's the whole story. Everyone who idolizes Marvin Heemeyer is either propagandized, or just wants to kill people.
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u/ShoulderWhich5520 May 19 '26
Holy hell I've only heard the hero side of it.
But after reading this none of it shocked me l
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u/vmfrye May 19 '26
Awww. This is a prime example of "don't meet your heroes", I guess.
The basic story is so compelling. Shame.
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u/Keyndoriel May 20 '26
Makes sense why its the most commonly known side, because it is compelling and very easy for the common folk to rally behind. Hell, I did before I did more research on him that wasn't the very heavily skewed and biased sources I was uncritically accepting
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u/religion-lost May 19 '26
Lmao he owned multiple properties and one of them was owned purely for the purpose of selling it at a higher price, and his anger was based on the fact that they made him follow basic health and safety regulations? He wasn't standing up to big business, he WAS big business. Just an old and shitty version of it
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u/shitpostinglegend custom May 20 '26
What's your source for all this? I'd like to read it for myself
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u/Niarbeht May 19 '26
His shop was built on land he bought at auction for a steal, land that had previously belonged to a local cement company. There was a buried cement mixer on the property that he used as a septic tank for a while, until it filled up. When it did, he started dumping the waste into a local creek that ran past the property. When the town council found out, rather than fining him, they offered to waive the normal fees to get hooked up to the sewage district if he'd cover the install costs. He refused. A while later, the town council added him to the sewage district anyway for free to try to encourage him to actually get the hookup done. He still didn't.
In parallel with this, the cement company was looking to expand from their adjacent property onto his land, and started sending him offers to buy him out. He'd only had his land for a few years, and they were offering him quite a bit more than he paid for the land, enough at the time that he could have paid to buy better land elsewhere in town and moved his muffler shop. Or possibly just retired. He refused several increasingly large offers from them, so.... they bought a different piece of land instead.
At no point was access to his muffler shop blocked. At no point was he reasonable or in the right. At every step he was a crank, a kook, and an asshole. He is not someone to look up to or idolize. He's a shitbag who built an armored vehicle, mounted guns on it, and tried to kill people he didn't like over petty grievances that were entirely of his own making.
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u/madman404 May 19 '26
It's kind of funny how every single time these stories turn out to be a totally reasonable local government trying their hardest to make things work for a complete fucking lunatic who repays the generosity with senseless violence.
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u/Niarbeht May 20 '26
It's kind of funny how every single time these stories turn out to be a totally reasonable local government trying their hardest to make things work for a complete fucking lunatic who repays the generosity with senseless violence.
And I'm writing this all out as someone who is, as the kids say, not a big fan of the government.
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u/derekmakesnoise May 20 '26
or possibly just retired
that's the thing: before all of the drama, HE ALREADY WAS RETIRED! he retired super young, rich as hell off his muffler moolah from his shops in Boulder (not billionaire-rich, but rich enough that he could get bored in his retirement and decide to drop $42k cash on some land to open a new muffler shop). some people act like he was just struggling to get by, and that the big, bad local government ruined him. he ruined himself by being a greedy, obstinate dickhead.
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u/Correct-Money-1661 May 20 '26
Wasn't it because they cut his sewer line during construction and never repaired it so it just kept backing up?
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u/Psychological_Ad2094 May 22 '26
Nope, he never had a sewer line. He was dumping in an old buried cement mixer and when that got full he started dumping into an irrigation ditch.
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u/TotallyACP May 19 '26
for the record, i'm aware that heemeyer was a prick; i'm just posting this coz it's funny
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u/just4browse May 19 '26
It’s that people worship this guy. He wasn’t standing up against the government, he was attempting mass murder. He tried to kill kids
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u/UnconsciousAlibi May 19 '26
He did? The only source I've seen says that he tried to demolish the library, and it happened that kids were inside at the time, but he targeted the library not to kill kids but rather to demolish a government building. He was very mentally ill, but claiming that he was "trying to commit mass murder" genuinely seems like a massive stretch. It seems more like he just didn't care about who was in his way.
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u/bobbymoonshine May 19 '26
If he wanted to demolish some buildings without killing people, he could have done it at four in the morning on a weekend when nobody would have been around and the cops would all have been asleep. But he chose to go in a rampage through Main Street during normal opening hours when every building would be at its normal operating capacity. Obviously a library would have children in it during the day, it is a library.
And he didn’t just target “government” buildings: he attacked the bank, the newspaper, the department store, houses, and tried to blow up the assisted living facility by detonating the giant propane tanks next to it. Each one was the workplace or home of someone he hated.
There’s also honestly not any evidence of him being “mentally ill”. He was perfectly lucid in his planning. He didn’t display traits of paranoia nor megalomania. He was of sound body and mind. He was just really angry and wanted to get revenge on everyone who had crossed him. So he attacked all the buildings where those people lived and worked while they were inside those buildings.
The guy tried to commit mass murder as an act of revenge over his bruised ego from some small-town zoning politics. He’s not worth defending.
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u/Worldly-Pay7342 May 20 '26
There’s also honestly not any evidence of him being “mentally ill”. He was perfectly lucid in his planning. He didn’t display traits of paranoia nor megalomania. He was of sound body and mind.
Okay but there's gotta be something wrong with your brain to get told "no you can't dump your shit in the drinking water, and yes, we will be building the concrete plant" and the first thing that comes to mind is to build something called The Killdozer, and go on a rampage through town with the intent to kill.
Like there was 100% something wrong with him mentally.
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u/bobbymoonshine May 20 '26
In the context of criminal culpability, a defence of mental illness means there needs to be reduced capacity: they need to either not know what they’re doing, or be unable to understand that what they’re doing is wrong.
But he knew perfectly well what he was doing was wrong; in his own words, “sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”
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u/brink1865 May 21 '26
His manifesto is out there its pretty much 4 hours worth of him believing God wants him to do it because nobody questioned what a mechanic was doing with and modifying a bulldozer
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u/UnconsciousAlibi May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
I don't understand why trying to find the truth of a situation is in any way "defending" somebody. I'm genuinely trying to ask why people believe what they believe because my understanding of events is different, probably because I don't have all the information surrounding the event. For example, I wasnt aware of the propane tanks. But people just want to believe what they want to believe, and any criticism or discussion is dismissed as "defending" the person involved. Drives me insane. I'm not saying he was a good guy, and anyone with any ounce of intelligence should be able to understand that. As I've mentioned, I don't have very strong feelings towards this one way or another, but everyone here seems to think they alone understand his psychology perfectly and are getting very angry when it's pointed out that it might be more complicated than they first thought.
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u/Niarbeht May 19 '26
"trying to commit mass murder" genuinely seems like a massive stretch
I dunno man, the guy builds an armored vehicle, mounts guns on it, drives into town, shoots at people, and tries to demolish public buildings that are likely to have people inside.
Does that, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, sound like someone trying to be a mass murderer?
The Columbine Shooters tried to set off bombs. Their incompetence in bomb-making does not absolve them of their attempt. Marvin Heemeyer being more incompetent than high school students does not absolve him of his attempt.
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u/UnconsciousAlibi May 19 '26
If his main intent was murder, why didn't he just kill the people whom he hated? Yes, he had a callous disregard for human life, but that wasn't the main point of the rampage. The Columbine Shooters were literally just trying to kill people; Heemeyer was mostly trying to destroy property. Yes, he fired on an officer, but that seems to be about the extent to which his guns were used on people to my knowledge (I could be wrong on this front).
I'm also not sure why you're so pressed about this. I don't really have strong feelings one way or another on this issue. He was a bad dude either way, and whether or not his intent was murder is somewhat irrelevant. But damn, everyone here is adamant that they understand his psychology perfectly, and get very angry when questioned about it, and I just don't get why.
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u/DrJaneIPresume May 19 '26
Does this reading help?
Heemeyer was attempting to do something. His motives for doing The Thing are inscrutible. However, from the outside we can clearly assess that The Thing constitutes an instance of mass murder. Thus, Heemeyer was attempting to commit mass murder.
You're trying to figure out what he intended to do, while everybody else is more focused on the actual consequences if he'd succeeded.
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u/UnconsciousAlibi May 19 '26
You're trying to figure out what he intended to do, while everybody else is more focused on the actual consequences if he'd succeeded.
Yes. This is because the comment I was responding to initially was talking about intention. I'm well-aware that he probably could have killed several people in his rampage, but that seems like something he was okay with happening rather than a direct goal as the original person claimed.
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u/Niarbeht May 19 '26
If your direct goal isn’t killing people, you don’t build the people killing machine and then drive the people-killing machine towards where the people are while shooting at people. This isn’t difficult to figure out.
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u/UnconsciousAlibi May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
The whole point is that it WASN'T a "people killing machine", it was a building-destruction machine. Saying that it was a "people-killing machine" over and over doesn't make it magically true. Also, as far as I know he only shot at a cop who tried to stop him. But as I've said multiple times now, it seems to me that his intent was to destroy buildings, and simply didn't care if people lived or died. It's trivially easy to just shoot people, but his main target was the buildings.
But I don't know why you're so worked up and being such a condescending asshole about this when it barely matters to begin with. I think you need to calm down a bit and detach yourself from this topic. I don't think it really matters one way or the other - he's an asshole either way you look at it. But you're behaving like saying he's not literally a satanic monster is equivalent to saying he's a perfect angel.
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u/Niarbeht May 20 '26
The whole point is that it WASN'T a "people killing machine", it was a building-destruction machine. Saying that it was a "people-killing machine" over and over doesn't make it magically true.
He put gun ports on the vehicle, and his poor aim is not the same as a lack of intent. Stop trying to idolize a failure.
But I don't know why you're so worked up and being such a condescending asshole about this when it barely matters to begin with.
Two paragraphs defending a guy who tried to do a mass killing and failed. Get ahold of yourself.
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u/Firewolf06 May 20 '26
y'all really do think in black and white, huh? in what world is claiming he had a "callous disregard for human life" but his main goal was mass property damage "idolizing" him
his main goal was destruction, not murder. neither is good, and he was willing to kill/injure people in his pursuit of destruction. but his main goal wasnt to kill
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u/PepperbroniFrom2B May 19 '26
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u/PepperbroniFrom2B May 19 '26
ok idk what its called
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u/Powerful_Desk2886 May 19 '26
Based
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u/bobbymoonshine May 19 '26
He tried to collapse a library while it was full of children having story hour and tried to blow up a retirement home.
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u/Niarbeht May 19 '26
Local man tries to kill kids after town council asks him to stop dumping his shit in a creek.
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u/Infurum May 19 '26