What It's Like When Your Town Is Attacked By A 'Killdozer'

At that point, Heemeyer pulled out a .357 caliber handgun and shot himself in the head.

Whitus does not consider Marvin Heemeyer a hero (though some do -- we'll get to that too), but there was obvious admiration in his voice when he talked about the Killdozer itself, saying that one guy building such a thing was "nothing short of phenomenal." He knows, because it was his job to crack it open. After consulting with an expert on what exactly kind of charge it would take to open up a tank, they rigged one up and detonated it.

It made a small dent. That's it.

Heemeyer had armored his dozer in layers of steel sheets and concrete slabs. The concrete absorbed the blast and rendered the Killdozer immune to an explosive that would've probably opened up an actual tank like a screen door. It would survive two more blasts before crews simply settled in to cut their way through with blowtorches (a process which took hours).

The point is, if the tank hadn't broken down, the rampage could have continued until Heemeyer ran out of either gas or structures to flatten. There would have been no stopping it. According to Whitus, the Killdozer was one of those rare cases of an insane rampage that didn't inspire any calls for new police equipment or training reforms. After studying the vehicle, it was concluded that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot they could do. "There was probably a handful of people in the world who could've come up with something like this," says Whitus. "Will we see it again in our lifetime? Probably not."

Here's some fan art he inspired:

This one has a Confederate flag added to the front:

Oh, Heemeyer never expressed any sympathies for the cause of the Confederacy (that we know of), but he hardly needed to. The thing about vigilantes is that we tend to turn them into mythological figures, standing up for whatever cause we project onto them. The guy built a goddamned tank; he must have had a good reason.

Patrick Brower -- the journalist who was almost killdozed in his own office -- tracked the story as it spread. "[I]t was on front pages all across the country, all around the world ... the phrase 'Killdozer' started popping up. Because Killdozer is actually a movie that came out in the 1970s, a very campy low-quality B-budget movie, and it was about a bulldozer that got possessed by an alien spirit." When he said "campy," we're pretty sure he meant "groundbreaking" and "transcendent," but his statement is otherwise accurate.

The internet thus immediately decided Heemeyer was a hero. Here he is on Badass of the Week, a popular Imgur gallery, and a viral Facebook post. Most of the positive coverage of the "Killdozer" quotes selections of Heemeyer's audio manifesto:

"You meddled in my business, and took what I deserve away. You took advantage of my good nature. And another thing you should learn is that when you visit evil upon someone, be assured it will revisit you, and that is what is happening."

Brower thinks this started with a local radio host who took calls from townsfolk who were sympathetic to Heemeyer, spreading the "Good man pushed too far" narrative. "People said that he'd welded himself inside the bulldozer. He knew it was a suicide mission, so he welded shut his own coffin." That, he says, gave Heemeyer a "crazy, magical aura."

Part of that narrative was that there were no guns in the Killdozer, which would imply it was a tool of property destruction only. There were in fact three rifles, two of them positioned in gun ports ...

... including a goddamned .50 caliber sniper rifle that fires a cartridge as long as your hand.

Most importantly, the early coverage painted Heemeyer as a victim of corrupt local authorities who'd ruined his life. It's an image that stuck with millions of people around the world. It's easy to see why. If you take out the suicide part, the guy is basically Iron Man with less ambition and bigger balls.

That's the myth. The reality is that Heemeyer had previously owned a string of repair shops around Colorado. He had enough cash to buy a massive bulldozer and attach Killdozer upgrades.

In the early '90s, Heemeyer got involved in a campaign to bring legalized gambling to the city, even launching his own newspaper to promote it. Patrick Brower's paper had come out against the measure, which was eventually voted down. That's the first time the local press and government wound up on Heemeyer's bad side.

Around that time, Heemeyer bought a patch of land for $42,000 and opened another muffler shop there. Several years later, a group looking to open a concrete batch plant offered to buy the land for $250,000. Heemeyer reportedly agreed, then later bumped the price up to $375,000, and maybe went as high as $1 million. Instead, the buyers went to the city to rezone the land around the shop and build there instead.

Heemeyer attempted to start a grassroots campaign to fight the plant. The problem was that the new plant would cut off customer access to his shop completely -- he apparently bought the bulldozer to create a new road, but permission for that was denied too. He lost his battle and was forced to sell the shop, at which point he immediately started building a Killdozer. The rampage would come a year and a half later; it was hardly done on impulse.

Did the zoning dispute go badly for him? No doubt. Did he have multiple chances to avoid that outcome? It seems like it. Did the city leave him no choice but to do what he did? Well, most schools of morality posit that even in the most bitter business disputes, there are always non-Killdozer options.