Lawfare Daily: The Explosive Mystery That Rocked Rural Georgia

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It meant something different to lots of people. You know, there were people that loved it, people that thought it was quirky. And then people who just absolutely thought it needed to go away. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of law fair with law fair managing editor, Tyler McBrion,

Megan Nadalsky of Goat Rodeo and Charles Minchew of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

“This really, I think, made our task so much harder and made the task of the GBI so much harder.”

It's a monument hated by so many people with so many motives blown up by something that anyone can buy. Anyone, anyone over 18? Today, we're talking the Georgia Guidestones, the mysterious Stonehenge of the United States that showed up in 1979 and got blowed up in 2022, who blew up the guidestones. We may have an answer for you.

So, Tyler, first of all, why did you run off and do this project where you solve a terrorism incident

with a publication other than law fair? Because you said, no, yeah, bad move on my part, but in all seriousness, it's just such a Georgia story and teaming up with the Atlanta Journal Constitution was very logical. It was a very a marriage of interests and needs. And then, of course, the bridge here is the wonderful people of Goat Rodeo who produce

all of law fair law fairs podcasts and now the agency as well. Yeah, so give us a little bit of the history of the project for those who have not listened to any of the episodes of who blew up the guidestones.

First of all, you want to solve that problem for yourself because it is now finished and it is amazing.

But what are the guidestones, or maybe I should say, what were the guidestones and what led you

“to pursue a seven part narrative podcast about who blew them up?”

Well, initially, it was sketched out as a six part and so the seventh was a surprise twist, grand finale ending, but for those who don't know the Georgia guidestones were a bit of an odd monument in rural northeastern Georgia in a county called Albert County with a very historic granite industry. They were built in 1979 to 1980 by a man who used the pseudonym RC Christian and they were blown up in 2022 by still a unknown person or persons. There's been still no rests.

At the time of this recording, there's been no rests and no suspects named by law enforcement. The genesis of the project is that I also grew up in Georgia. I had heard about them growing up

from first from my sister actually and they always were this magnet of conspiracy theories because

of what was written on them first and then I think just conspiracy theories began conspiracy theories and so they took on a life of their own until their eventual demise in 2022. And it's just always

“been a story that stuck with me and like any, I think, hometown monument. I never, I always thought”

I could visit them. They'd always be there. This is massive monument to stone, weighing thousands of tons of solid granite, but then someone blew them up and they were gone and I think this was part of my journey to try to make up for that or like reconstitute them in some way for myself and luckily I was talking to Ian and Megan about it and they also, I think, you know, were interested

Megan, how did you get involved in this project and had you ever heard of the guide stones

when Tyler first approached you about them? Yes, so I would just like to say here on this show

that I'm the only one here right now that has actually seen the Georgia guide stones before they were destroyed. I'm with Tyler on weird and wonderful roadside monuments. I had no idea that they might have the dark past or origins that they had, but I went and took a weird picture in front of them. I'm on a surveillance piece of surveillance footage somewhere that Charles might have helped

“to dig up, but that's how and the way that we started doing the project with Tyler was as all”

good goat rodeo projects started in escalating series of drinks where Tyler got asked about a

blank check if he could make anything. What would he make in his first answer would Georgia

guide stones and I said, I've been there, let's do it, you know, so. And I'll just add, um, for Law Fair listeners, the drinks in question here were following a panel event for the podcast escalation, which goat rodeo produced in which I co-hosted with Nostia La Pottenen, so it was just uh, it was a quick hand off, but one to the next. Excellent, and Charles, how did you get roped into this merry band? Well, the the request to me first was, can you help us find some records about

the explosion of the guide stones? And I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll see what I can find. And I was, I was thinking I was just setting up for one one hour interview and here I am still through episode seven. Very cool. All right, and so how did the itlet more broadly, how did the Atlanta Journal Constitution get involved? It was, this is a local story for you guys, but as I understand it, this is something that Tyler and Megan approached the AJC about, not the other way around.

“Is that right? That that is correct. But the thing that is important to note here is the”

AJC has been covering the guide stones since they, since they went up, it started first as a features, like we sort of talked about that quirky roadside attraction. It would be covered as we moved on through politics. A lot of the reporters at the AJC would cover it when it'd come up because it did often. And then finally, it hit the front page of the news when it was blown up. So it made a lot of sense that this has been a story that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has been following

all the way through. So they, they really were the only ones to do it. And Charles give us a brief history of the guide stones for those for whom this all sounds like ancient Greek. Tyler mentions that they were put there mysteriously by somebody named RJ Christian and they were there until somebody blew them up a few years ago. What were they and and what was the nature of the controversy about them? Yeah. Well, I will tell you as a student of Georgia history in eighth

grade growing up in South Georgia we learned about the Georgia guide stones as Georgia stone

hinge. But we never really learned about the messages written on the stones just that this roadside

auditing existed. So you're right, it was built in the late 1970s early 1980s by this guy named RJ Christian who was only known to have to one or two folks in Albert County. He had these kind of just these ideals for how to guide humanity. You know, some people would say well it's to guide humanity after kind of a cataclysm. But as we dug deeper throughout the podcast it was really that we found out, well this guy believed in some pretty bad things. You know there's some white

supremacy at play. There's you know some genocidal thoughts at play. It's not from this, you know, very beneficial view of humanity. It's from a really dark place. And you know, just as mysteriously as they went up they kind of mysteriously went away in July of 2022. And Tyler you introduced the show by basically saying there are two mysteries here. One is who put them there and the other is who took them away. But one of the mysteries you solve pretty quickly because frankly somebody else

“had sort of already solved it. So let's dispense with that one at the outset. Who is RJ Christian?”

Why did he put the guidestones there? And how did this stay secret for a long time until it didn't? And you know how did it come out who they were? Yeah this was really surprising to me.

And I didn't realize the first one had essentially been solved. But but but basically I just had so RC Christian is a pseudonym used. And for anyone who's interested in the occult or offshoots sex of Christianity. Some people theorize that this is a code for resurrectionism. And a lot of the precepts on the actual stones themselves, comport with some teachings of resurrectionism, harmony of nature, that kind of thing. But the as Charles was saying they immediately were lighting

around of controversy mostly because of the first precept which which intrigues people to maintain humanity under 500 million. And even in 1980 that would take billions of people to die.

So so you know people always cast a wary eye at them because of especially because of this one.

Charles also mentioned that it was called "George's Stonehenge or America's Stonehenge." And this is because RC Christian in addition to writing out the precepts also published a book a manifesto of sorts in which he explicitly referenced Stonehenge and said, "Well the only problem with Stonehenge is that there was nothing written on it. We don't know what it meant." And so he took it upon himself to write on his. But in the course of our early reporting

what we found was that there's a reporter, a very great reporter who's now at the AJC, his name is Thomas

“Lake. At the time he was writing for CNN right after I believe the guy's stones were exploded,”

he started poking into the same questions and he stumbled upon a bit of a fringe documentary that was released in 2015 I believe but had been made you know over the course of years. By two evangelical Christian filmmakers with I think it's fair to say limited distribution. But the film is called Dark Clouds Overal Albertin. And Albertin is the town where the God stones were located. Or exactly. Which they were located. Right. Yeah so Albert County is the

county with all the granite quarries and the granite finishing shreds and then Albertins that the town itself. And they found this film Dark Clouds Overal Albertin. And in it it's a remarkable watch. It's some of it's a bit hokey and cheesy but I think that adds to the appeal. They essentially stumble upon the fact that they I will make a long story short. They threw some very interesting reporting. They found that they're pretty sure that it's a man named Herbert Kirsten,

our Robert Christian, Herbert Kirsten, fairly similar. From Fort Dodge, Iowa, who was an valid egenesis. He was a supporter of William Shockley, who was a leader of the American egenesis movement. There's extensive correspondence between them. And he also would write in support of

“Malfusion, worries of population control and local newspapers. And I think the kicker for a lot of”

us was that he was he wrote an endorsement letter and I believe also donated to the campaign of David Duke, former KKK Gran Wizard who was running for office. So this, you know, I'm matched to a very unsavory profile of a man who was putting his, his, his, his, his, unsavory ideas out there and his

racist ideas. Although is I mean the idea that you want to keep the population under 500 million is

pretty unpleasant even in 1979 when they were only like four or five billion people in the world. But most of the guide stones precepts are pretty unobjectionable, right? They're kind of like be nice to nature. Exactly. They're, they're just kind of, some of it's just sensible advice. Some of it though, interestingly, does address law and governance, calling for a world court, calling for it to unite humanity under a new language, kind of like a, like an Esperanto.

“Esperanto, exactly. Yeah. And so I, you know, I did wonder if he was also, this, I think it”

makes sense, you know, of the time as well. But yeah, no, I, most of them are very unobjectionable to the point of just being kind of like, woo, woo, just like nice things that are written. With a little bit of racism and you just sprinkle in there and we're spraying a lot of going to do things exactly. But, but I will say also, there is different interpretations of the

maintain humanity under 500 million because he said he was writing for these were guide stones

as Charles was saying for after the calamity in his time, this being what he, I think what he saw as an inevitable nuclear clash between the US and Soviet Union. So, so that was like guiding it for maintaining when we, we rebuild the world. Gotcha. All right. So, set up by a woo woo environmentalist post-apocalyptic eugenicist. It sits there, becomes a tourist attraction, kind of gathering

But it is always objected to by evangelical folks and eventually becomes a kind of obsessive focus

of QAnon types. Charles, what's the, tell me about like what, the sort of gathering storm of people who don't like the guide stones over the course of the 90s and the current last couple decades, when did they become a thing that people were demanding be removed? You know, I have to go back and look at when the first calls for removal happen. But they really, some of the calls began to grow, you know, round the same time and, you know, mid-2010s when the kind of, you know,

far-right alt-right groups kind of started to pop up and you kind of saw some of this Christian

Nationalism rise to the top of the kind of discourse around the US that that some of that same

stuff started bubbling up locally. You can listen to Albert County Board of Commissioner meeting the minutes or read those minutes and the even in the weeks leading up to the explosion and

“July of 2022, where there were folks who were coming in the meeting saying, you need to tear these”

down, they're a monument to, you know, to Satan, people who were reading really outspoken about it in the government as like, well, it's, it's, it's there, you know, we're not going to vote to tear this down. But you also have, you know, when you also have these situations where you look

through the police reports of times that the, the officers actually went out to the guidestones,

you know, we looked about three or four years before the explosion and found times where officers went out there and found what appeared to be chicken blood on the guidestones. Our red paint but you also had people who were filming music videos out of the guidestones and in one unfortunate situation, you even had a person who tried to take their own life out of the guidestones and they survived as far as we, we know. So it meant something different to lots of people, you know,

there were people that loved it, people that thought it was quirky and then people who just absolutely thought it needed to go to go away. Yeah, Charles getting those records been those incident reports helped us build a bit of a timeline where along with the interviews with people, we were able to see, yes, it meant a lot of different things to different people. But starting in around 2016, what the incidents that happened at the stones started to sort of increase in severity and in terms

“of how serious, you know, someone painted you won't win in red spray paint. I believe it was around”

2016 on the stones, the suicide around attempt around that time and things just sort of started to ratchet up. We were able to really build a timeline from those reports to see are ratcheting up of incidents around the stones and then online too, which it was really interesting to see the fever pitch. Right. So I'm curious just how each of you felt about the stones were they a weird cool roadside curiosity were they something that was, you know, spiritually interesting or important

were they satanic and/or monument to you Genesis. What did like, what did you think about them? I learned about them in middle school didn't think about them much again until they blew up if you loved. I'm July 6th. I was in the HAC newsroom when we heard about the explosion and was just like, wow, that's weird. So in those intervening years didn't think about it a lot like Tyler, I had moved, you know, I had moved back to Georgia in 2022. Did not do this, but I moved back

“in 2022 and wanted to visit and never never got the chance. Tyler, what did you make of them?”

Yeah, it's funny, you know, Charles is reminding me of when when we were reporting this, I had to kind of keep reminding myself that everyone in Elverton doesn't, they don't walk around all day just constantly thinking about the guide stones, they have jobs, they have lives. But when I started this project, I really was fascinated more so and just the reactions that they listed and other people, you know, how how they could just map on to the conspiracy theory, du jour of whatever time period it was.

But then something happened, so over the course of the reporting we found the guide stones, the remnants of them, they were just essentially dumped at someone's quarry. I won't go into that too

small piece of the guide stones and I, I had a few misapps, a few unfortunate incidents and so

I, I started to sort of believe in the power and started joking path joking that I was cursed through a series of unfortunate events that occurred after I took the guide stone piece back to

“my apartment in New York. But I think that helped, honestly, with reporting this to try to”

meet these people where they are and you think, you know, how they think and take it seriously. I'm curious what what Megan will say is there. Megan, you were there, you actually saw them while they were still alive. What do you make of them? Well, I feel I feel a little bit like you and I might be similar this way and then I think so it seems like so much of the world has been flattened recently that we sometimes forget just how weird and wonderful and different, so many different

like so many places are and Georgia is certainly one of those places that entertains the weird

wonderful. So at first without knowing anything, I was like Charles, I feel a little actually

dumb saying this, but I didn't think much about what was on the stones. I just thought they were very cool and huge. I mean, if you saw them in person, they really were stunning. And then

“I think we talked to the man who alongside his father, hand chiseled every letter on to those stones.”

So then I started thinking about them really as like, you know, needing to be respected as the work of an artist, you know, or people that really cared and respected their craft and and maybe also didn't think too much about a paying job, right? But then as things got much darker, it made me really think in general about monuments and and what of what Charles was saying in the United States, which is they mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people,

but there is usually a an original truth about what their intent was and why they were put up and it felt important to me that we and Tyler and the whole team here that we really acknowledged that and then also took very seriously that someone took it into their own hands to blow them up and and I still feel very much that that isn't something anyone should get to do.

“So. All right. So what happened the night of July 6th, 2022, is that right?”

Tyler give us the the raw facts. Yes. Well, first I'll say, I mean, to Megan's point,

there was I think at first, at least a bit of a struggle to establish the stakes here, and then if we can get into that later to you know, it's a, there were no fortunately, there was no one was hurt, there were no, no one was missing, etc. It was. Yeah, but a bomb went off. Exactly. In the United States, I used to think that like a bombing was a big deal and like like, you know, you're coming over to me, like there's that much space to establish,

somebody didn't like a public monument and blew it up. So I'll give you the facts of what was known publicly before we release the show. And we know this because there's surveillance footage that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation released to the public, I mean, they after the bombing, but in the early morning hours of July 6th, around 350 AM, a silver car pulls up, it pulls up it's out of the side of the cameras, though. You see someone a figure walk up to the foot of the

guide's zones with the container. They set the container down, although they're by that point, they're blocked by one of the guide's zones. Then they sort of skip off in a very odd way into the darkness of the tree line, about 10 minutes elapses. There's a huge explosion from the container. That was at the foot of the guide's zones. There's white smoke going everywhere and it's pretty cinematic because the guide's zones were lit up at night. And then immediately you start to hear

a car revots engine and a silver car flashes across the screen and the smoke starts to settle and that's it. And so then immediately that day, later in the day, the local police show up, I believe ATF shows up as well, the GBI show up. They assess that the site is too dangerous to start their investigation because the explosion broke one of the six pieces. The rest were still standing, but very precariously, there were a lot of cracks in the granite. So they brought a,

I think, a backhoe or some sort of bulldozer in knock them down and then began their investigation. Nah, no fling for such a ending. The red-cut-cabbage is a weapon with a red-cut-cabbage, with a red-cut-cabbage, with a red-cut-cabbage or a kind of a type of animal, all the way to the corner.

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First of all, this is one mystery the show answers completely, which is what happened to them.

“They disappeared and I believe it's in episode 4. You guys find them. I'm not going to”

ask you where they were, but how did you find them? They found us. It's an episode 6. We have been monitoring social media doing open source investigation for the local Facebook groups. We saw they were very active. We posted in someone from the agency posted in one of the Facebook groups that for Albertonians and someone DMed us and said, "I have the guide stones at my quarry. They just appeared here when I got back

from July 4th vacation in 2022." I thought he was pulling our leg. I got up. We got on the phone with him. He started talking about lizard people almost right away. I wrote him off and then he sent his photos with geotag with the time the metadata all checked out. We flew down to Georgia and he had the goods and they were sure enough just sitting at his quarry a little overgrown at this point in disarray and broken pieces, but they were there. Megan, are they cooler and broken

pieces or cooler standing? They look like the 10 commandments like broken into pieces in a random field then. I would say they would still be worth looking at. They're so wild. I was talking to some folks after that episode and I was told by someone in Albert County that the quarry that they are at are the quarry that they came from so the guides don't turn back where they started. That's kind of cool. 40 less years ago.

Once I revealed that I had a piece of the guide stones, an actual auctioneer emailed me or someone who could purported to be an auctioneer saying that there's some real money near we could auction this off if you like. All right. So next question. What do you use to blow up a giant

monument Charles when you, you know one of the first things you would want to establish as an

“investigator is what kind of explosives would be used to do this? Who bought that kind of explosives?”

This is a quarry town so everybody assumes that we're talking about dynamite from one of the quarries but it turns out the story is a little different from that. So give us a, give us a story about the explosives for insects. Yeah. So the first, you know, the first thing that GBI ATF would have run now was where's all the dynamite in the Albert County and it was all there. So it's like okay, this investigation is good to be over pretty quickly. If we determine it's dynamite,

we find the missing dynamite, we find the bomber. Well, we dug into a little bit more and found out through explosive experts and through law enforcement sources that was most likely probably tannerite, which tannerite is totally different from dynamite. Right. So what is it? So tannerite

is a binary mixture. Basically, you have two kinds of powder and I'm not a chemist so I cannot

“remember what the two chemicals are right now. But you get powder that's in two different”

packets. You mix it together and you can do this in like half pound or one pound increments and you shoot it with a high powered rifle and it explodes. It's really great for sighting a gun if you are a hunter or something you want to see if your gun is actually hitting targets right on. I've used it in South Georgia. I've seen as much as 10 pounds of the stuff blow up. So in order to test this out, we saw how easy it is to buy tannerite. How much tannerite would it take to blow

up the God stones? You know, we're not sure entirely, but we think it would take around 40,

you get it without attracting law enforcement attention? That's not something you're going to

“use to check out any high power rifle sighting. What happens when you go and try to buy quantities”

of tannerite in the volume that it would take to do something like this? I'm going to just start this by saying as of today April 28th, I have not been contacted by anybody of my local police or GBI for buying 20 pounds of the stuff back in January to like half of what you would need. Yeah, half of what I would need. So I went to a sporting good store up in Kineshal, Georgia. So that's northwest Atlanta, metro area for folks who aren't familiar. Walked into the store and it

took me longer to actually, you know, find the stuff because I walked to the wrong side of the store.

And that's an episode four of the podcast and I called Megan while I was in the store because I didn't want to be muttering like a crazy person talking to myself. I saw the one pound package,

“the five pound package and then kind of the big package, a 20 pound package of this stuff.”

It's all in little bags that's meant to be mixed together in small quantities. But I walked that with 20 pounds, you know, the cashier didn't even know what I was buying. There was no ID check. There was no no questions like are you 18 or older? It was just so what is it cost? I paid 120 bucks or 20 pounds. So you could blow up the guidestones for 250 bucks. Yeah, 250 bucks and, you know, you need access to a rifle. But those are pretty common in rural. Those are common in Georgia.

You don't, you don't need a permit for a gun. You don't need a permit for Tannerite in Georgia. So why does anybody use high explosives or like, you know, why don't we have a lot more bombings in this country? It seems like a cheap effective way to make a loud statement. I'm sound like I'm being cheeky, but I'm really not. I'm curious why, you know, we have all these mass shootings, we have all these, you know, terrorist incidents. Yeah. I haven't the bad guys noticed Tannerite.

Well, when we two things, when we did talk to an expert who had, you know, done the investigation

on the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympics bombing, one of the things he said first of all was

that they are seeing Tannerite more and more. It is being used at an increasingly alarming pace. That isn't a, you know, necessarily something we took up with the podcast, but that is one of the things he wanted to talk about over and over again. Second thing is that the guidance he gave us and that we were given over and over again is that bombings are very rare because of the type of person who wants to carry something like that out. You could blow yourself up easily. It isn't

like Charles just told you he's not a chemist, you know, it is a chemistry, you know, sort of experiment. So we just found that the profiles of someone who would do this, there weren't that many people, even though the access was, you know, they didn't even check his ID. And Tyler, what other than the absence of dynamite missing led you to the idea that this was probably a Tannerite bombing. As Charles was saying, the bomb experts that we spoke to, based on the site and the sound and the

color of the smoke, for example, essentially was, was doing a visual forensic analysis of the surveillance video. And so based on that with a high degree of confidence already, we thought it was Tannerite, but that was actually a confirmation of a tip we got from from a source in law enforcement,

“who said that they essentially concluded that it was Tannerite. I think also the absence of the”

ETF is also a tell here. The ETF I believe showed up, but left fairly quickly. I assume this is an assumption. I assume because they concluded it was Tannerite, which is, does not fall under, you know, the ETF's concern. It would be a stretch to say the Tannerite is unregulated. It is very lightly regulated and it varies by state. And of course, the way in which this person used it is illegal, but by buying the amounts to a mass, this quantity is easily done. And so I mean, this really,

I think made our task so much harder and made the task of the GBI so much harder. It's a monument hated by so many people with so many motives blown up by something that anyone can buy,

if you've seen the surveillance video, you see a person carrying one of those heavy,

“like plastic totes. And that's all you need for Tannerite. You just need it in a contained place.”

You don't need any kind of like, you know, tape and a timer and wires and everything. You just need a vessel and the powder and then something to strike it with. And the last thing I'll say is that, I mean, I have to your question, Ben, some of the bad guys have figured it out as Megan was saying and it has been used in tax, but it's also been used. There have also been a lot of horrible accidents with Tannerite. They've been used in gender reveals even when used properly. It's an explosive.

And so that was a very concerning sort of side plot to this story of learning about Tannerite and it's very light regulations. Yeah, I think one of the other reasons Tannerite has not been

“used in a lot of terrorist bombings is that you have to be in the immediate vicinity of the bombing”

to pull it off. Right. So because it doesn't remotely detonate, you have to be within line of sight. And that makes it unappealing from the vantage point of somebody who wants to plant a bomb and be five miles away by the time it blows up. The time device is actually gives you time to escape whereas if you have to be within line of sight with a high power rifle, your chances of getting caught in rural Georgia at night is one thing, but if you're like, for example, at the

Boston Marathon or at other places where people want to detonate bombs, that's a little bit more dicey. So with all of that as a 40-minute prologue Tyler, who blew up the guidestones, I couldn't say that we raised the question of we found two people that we really think the GBI should have and probably still should look into. There were a lot of things about them that experts told us to look out for. I'm being very careful with my words here as you can tell.

But like all but confessing in a voicemail messages, I mean, like there's some stuff in there that in the last episode, which is now public, I mean, it's a little bit more than circumstances, they get really close to telling you we did it.

Yeah, at first I'll say, these two men, we only use their first names, Eric and Ken, they

denied any involvement in the guidestones bombing. But yes, to your point, I got some voicemails, I had extensive conversations on the phone with both of them. At times, we're not seemingly able to just unequivocally deny their involvement later if they did. But yeah, I mean, there were some really, yeah, some curious like Megan and Charles, what were the biggest things that jumped out when we

“started talking to them. I think, you know, in episode five, we, you know, in addition to looking for”

anyone who had prior experience with explosives, which we, one of the people we talk about

does, and that, you know, that was really one of the first things we started to sort of hone in on.

The second thing was any involvement with Candice Taylor, or any support of Candice Taylor, now we haven't talked about Candice Taylor yet, but since you mentioned her explain who she is and what her relationship with this whole story is. Well, Candice Taylor is a politician from South Georgia during her race for governor back in Tyler, Charles 2020, 2022. She decided to roll out her campaign platform with a series of videos. She had 10 sort of orders, 10 executive orders.

And she was looking for a 10th. She kind of figured out her nine was looking for a 10th, and had visited the Georgia guides dons, and as she explained to us, gotten a very creepy, uh, eerie feeling. She does sort of ascribed to some QAnon type school of thoughts as well. And when it came time to to make her campaign platform, she thought of the Georgia guides dons, and she made a video very cinematic, and we've all seen it a couple times, that mentioned that the Georgia guides don't

should come down if she were elected for Georgia governor. She sort of synonymous with the Georgia guides dons. So you're looking for people with explosives backgrounds who are supportive of Candice Taylor,

Yeah, I mean, you know, we're looking for people who were in Albert County, people who have history

with explosive devices are no other way around firearms. We're looking for people who are supporters of Candice Taylor, we're looking for people who just have an axe to grind with people in Albert County, right? And we find all of those, and in some of the places that we looked, nothing that's definitive, we're not, we don't have access to a case file, we don't have access to the buckets of

“evidence. We can just follow the thread and pull it until we can't pull anymore, and that's what we've”

done in episode seven. Yeah, the last piece I'll say is that the getaway car that I mentioned earlier,

we arrived at what we believe to be the most likely-making model of a certain type of BMW that's

fairly, it's not very new, it's there aren't so many on the road, and we did that through a series of, you know, ask crowdsourcing from car nerds on Reddit and downloading a 3D model and, you know, overlaying that, but we also found that these people would have had access to a BMW had bought sold cars, fixed them, often European cars made mention in 2022 in a Facebook post of a POS BMW. So, so that was another big thing as well, chasing down the the getaway car and that also

fit, or at least we didn't find anything that would have made it impossible for them for it to be

done. So what happens now, the guidestones are back in a quarry, is anybody planning to do anything

with them, are they just going to sit there? You know, is the quarry owner going to create a

“tourist side out of the final resting place? What's the future of the guidestones?”

Well, I think, you know, when we met with the man who has the guidestones on his property, there was talk of donating them to a local museum, one of the local museums, the Albertin Granite Museum, there was also talk of, they'd make a very cool park. A Tyler has actually, I think, already written up a context plaque that's, you know, it's print ready. And so there, but when we did talk to folks in the town, I don't know what might have changed for them. It's really their

choice. It's their communities, their monument. There was a lot of fear that if they were to put the guidestones back in any way, it would be something that that might make them nervous as a target of, especially if there are no arrests made of a future attack. I want to ask about why the investigation of this has been so disultery. This happened in 2022. ATF, normally, if there's a bombing, the feds are, take that very seriously. ATF seems to have shown up and then wandered away.

“The George of Bureau of Investigations. I mean, I think you guys account of the GBI investigation,”

it's just completely devastating in terms of the number of people who've been interviewed in terms of the signs of life. So Charles, I'm curious why you think both state and federal authorities were so uninterested in getting to the bottom of this over a pretty protracted period of time. Is it, is it because nobody suspected that this was ISIS that did it? Is it because Tannaride is not that big a deal? What do you make of the fact that you guys

probably solved this crime four years after it happened and law enforcement's interests seemed so minimal? Yeah, I think it's the case of the GBI has quite a lot of stuff that they're actively working on. And in the case of the guidestones, nobody died. Nobody got hurt. And there's a lot of stuff on their plate. So I think that if there's interest within the GBI, it just kind of fell down their priority list. Like, we'll come to it when we get a tip.

We'll come to it when we get more information. We spent a lot of time trying to get in touch with the GBI. Megan and Tyler went to their office in Athens and we had had lots of on calls. And then when we do go down this rabbit hole to talk about the two folks in episode seven, we reached out to the GBI again and they talked to us that time. We told them what we knew and

about what we knew and why we were so concerned that we would get our company security involved

and that we would come to the GBI with information about these two people. The short answer is we don't know because we had such a difficult time getting the GBI to talk to us. My charitable interpretation here is that as Charles was saying, they had a lot on their plate. I found some local reporting at the time from January 2022 that said that the GBI's lab had a backlog of 29,000 cases. I'm sure a lot of them were violent crimes that

“involved bodily harm or death or something that are higher priority. I think they were just”

getting inundated with tips from conspiracy theorists. They didn't take it seriously. It was just a bunch of rocks blown up in a field. And then I think my less charitable interpretation is as I was getting to is that they just didn't care. They didn't take it seriously. Which I think was hard for some people in Albertin to swallow because they wanted closure. It was also a serious, successful explosion in their town. It's a much more visceral thing for them.

I think the last thing I would say is it seems solvable to a lot of people. There's surveillance footage. There's a getaway car. There's a person on camera putting it down. I think all of that a lot of confusion over what the investigation was doing or not. Yeah. And I would just say Ben, I think

“one thing is if all of those things are true that they didn't take it very seriously or it wasn't”

a priority or they had a giant case log. I mean, we understand open records laws. We get that. But there was also at the same time this extreme stonewalling that went on as we tried to ask for any information about if we couldn't quite get a straight answer either. It was very consequential and they had something in their pocket that they were following or they didn't care at all. And if they didn't care at all, then why this total lack of wanting to work with the

Atlanta Journal Constitution on this effort, it just really didn't square for me. And what do we know about the current state of the investigation you went and shared a bunch of information with them? Now you've shared that information with the public. What do we know about

where what the status of this duo is in front of the GBI? So first let's say the episode came out

today as of the time of recording. So something may happen in the next few days. But the current status is that the case is still open and that they, I need to, this may not be the exact quote, but the GBI told us on the record after we told them about these people, these two men that it's an active lead that they're looking into. And I think that's about all. And when you say it is an active lead, is it an active lead because you told them about it or is it

an active lead because they already knew about these guys? My guess is the former. They told us on the record that they, I put that they had not heard of these names before we saw it. So Charles, one last question before I let you guys all go, what happened to the Tanner right after you guys were done with the show? Do you still have it? You know, it's something that we discussed, you know, we had lots of conversations with our attorneys, with our publisher, law enforcement,

we've really thinking about how do we, how do we get rid of this stuff? Because, you know,

“the best way to get rid of it is to blow it up. But lots of people didn't want us to do that,”

it said it was bad idea. So it's still setting in a box on an undisclosed location only to me. And we're waiting to deal with it. That's season two. Oh, we blew up the Tanner right. Well, we are going to leave it there. Congratulations to all three of you. The show is who blew up the guidestones. There is a, I would say a boatload of stuff that we did not talk

about in this show, including the fact that this isn't the first monument in Elberton that has been ripped down and kind of disappeared. There's a history of this. And it all does connect back to race.

And there's just a million interesting threads here. You can listen to Charles buying 20 pounds of

Tanner right. You can hang out with Tyler as he visits the guidestones in an overgrown field.

'Cause it's an unsolved act of terrorism. Thank you, Tyler, Charles, and Megan for joining us today.

“Thanks for having us, Ben. This is great. Thanks, Ben. Thanks a lot.”

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I'm Jen, a late this week. No, I'm a Zickling and Found.