Ep 4: We Bring the Boom

AJC, or maybe 10 minutes or so, from downtown Elburton.

There's not really much to see here, a fence, some patches of grass, other than the fact that we turned down Guide Stone Road, I feel like we could be anywhere in North Georgia. This is where the Guide Stone's used to be, waiting here for us is Wayne Molonex. Hey Wayne. Tyler, this is Wayne.

How you doing? Thanks for having us.

“What is it that you won't know that everybody don't already know?”

Where'd they go? Yeah. Like all? Yeah. Like I blowed up.

Wayne used to own this land before he deited it to Elburton County, so that RC Christian

could build the Guide Stone's here. Wayne did some work on the Guide Stone's too. I've done the work for a done work at Mr. Fanlight, his quarry, and his shed, and he wanted me to put the foundation in, and Mr. Christian wanted it up on a high hill next to a main road with no trees.

I actually can't really tell where the Guide Stone stood. There's nothing that would make you think a huge, granite monument used to be here. Do you know what happened to the foundation that you laid, is it still, yeah, still it's still under the ground because it was like two and a half foot sink, like 30 something feet square with remor, and that was the purpose of putting that foundation as because

“if we ever had a earthquake, it would all still be tied to Gilla, and that's what the”

talk kept. Wayne knows this land well, his house is just down the road.

He passed the Guide Stone's every day until July 6th, 2022.

Did you hear the explosion? Definitely. It shook me in the bayon, but I didn't smell anything, didn't hear anything, but it did shake our house enough to work, shook a few things off the wall. Wow.

So it was really. When did you, when did it occur to you that it might be the Guide Stone's, or did you hear about that? No, I didn't hear about it. It was God's help, hmm, who would want to do that?

Even though the Guide Stone's aren't here anymore, according to Wayne, people still come to this site. There's people that still comes up here and climbs over the fence right there, going out

“there looking for any rock that they could pick up that might be in part of it.”

Often as that happened. Well, you see vehicles up here all the time. Still. Still? Yeah.

Yeah. Up here at night, there's people to come up with campers and they'll pull off over here, show, but I see people up here all the time. But it's not my problem. When the Guide Stone's were here, even more people visited at all hours, and not all

of the visitors had good intentions. The county had to install security cameras to keep watch. You might be pointing out, because we heard about the cameras, we've seen the footage, pointing out where they were, just so we can kind of visualize. As a pole, as a pole, right behind you, as a pole over here, and this one here.

Wayne points to a set of poles around the perimeter of the fence line. From what he says, there were four cameras, placed far apart from each other. I'm also curious how you think of the actual explosion itself. Some people think it's bandalism, some people think it's domestic terrorism and everything in between.

I don't know how you kind of grapple with the crime itself. All I can say is they're gone. A gong. We asked Wayne a few times about who he thinks did it. And to be honest, I'm not really sure if he knows anything.

But he definitely wants me to think he knows something. Who ever done it had a reason? I'm sure, although they wouldn't have spent the time in the effort to have done what they done. So if they're okay with it, I have to be okay with it.

Have you seen the pieces of the remnants? Oh yeah. Yeah? Where are they? Okay, tell you.

I was kind of confused at Wayne, shrugging off the question of who did it and how it happened. It was frustrating to hear that he just wanted to move on or ignore it, especially because there are just so many pieces of evidence. This crime feels so solvable. There were cameras capturing the crime from multiple angles, potential suspects demanding

their destruction in the days leading up. Even the county commission had given names to investigators of people who had a clear motive to harm the guidestones.

just a little old-country boy and I'm digging a dirt every day."

There are people who know something.

“First responders who showed up right after the explosion, law enforcement who we figured”

would be hunting down every lead, the sheriff's office, the police. But when we tried to talk to them, the authorities, "Well, that wasn't any more productive and standing in a field with Wayne." Albert County Emergency Services, yes, hi, I'm wondering if Chuck Almond was available. Hello, is this Darren?

It is. Hi, Darren. My name's Megan.

I work with the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

How are you today? Good. I have already spoken with one person, if you call them me about the guidestones, you have to find somebody else. I don't know what you're looking for, but that is not technically in our jurisdiction.

We don't have a law if it is for you. The customer service is free for Albert and Matt and Albert and Utility. There was an official investigation, but it was a total black box. No one had been announced as a suspect. Wayne had gotten the land back and sold it off to someone else, who was thinking about

building a house where the stones once stood. Everyone seemed to have moved on, but so many pieces of the investigation were missing. How were the guidestones blown up? Where is all the security camera footage? Who did the investigators talk to?

This is a case about a bombing in a small town.

“So, why does it seem like no one is taking it seriously?”

And how do you get to the facts when no one will answer your questions? I'm Tyler McBrion. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, this is, who blew up the guidestones? Episode 4, we bring the boom. I mean, I'm looking at this one from June 15th, 2022.

We don't know who this person was that wrote this one. It was from iguana-honor, this is Charles Minchew. He's the senior editor of Data Journalism at the A.J.C. This is about three weeks, three weeks before the guidestones blew up. After finding out this county maintains these monuments, supporting genocide of the world

population, I would like to request that the Georgia guidestones be torn down. As a data journalist, Charles is kind of a desk guy. While some reporters knock on doors, Charles knocks on servers.

“He's the man you call when you need to find the things hiding in the system, government”

records, registrations, identities. Sometimes, when people don't talk, data will. You know, we deal with documents that we get PDFs or in some cases stacks of paper that we need to scan and look through. So it's not about trying to read every single page in any kind of document dump that we get.

It's about strategizing how we actually work through it and then really looking for the good stuff.

Which is why one of the first things Charles did was write to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation

and file an open records request to try and get the case file. A document that would tell us what the GBI did, who they spoke to. A few sources had told us that the case was closed and it seemed pretty cold to me at least. We thought we could pick up where the GBI left off and start looking deeper. But in the state of Georgia, calling a case open or closed makes all the difference.

They've told the county that's closed, but they'll tell us whenever, you know, organizations like ours make a record request for documents that say, "Well, it's still open so we can't give you anything." And the GBI could close that investigation this afternoon and we made this request a couple weeks ago and they wouldn't tell us. If the GBI says it's an open case, we're out of luck.

But if it's a closed case, meaning they're no longer actively working on it,

“then it would be subject to Georgia record requests laws.”

Unfortunately for us, the GBI was telling us the case was open. So Charles had to get creative. He started asking other entities for records, like the Albert County Board of Commissioners, for any emails they got about the guidestones around the time of their destruction.

And he also put a never-quest to the Albert County Sheriff's Office.

So I also asked for any kind of incident reports that were called in out there between early 2020 to the present day. Up to this point, we had heard a lot of crazy stories about things that went down at the guidestones. Some of them definitely untrue. Some of them believable. rituals, chicken guts, vandalism, but it was all word of mouth, local lore.

What the incident reports finally gave us was some hard documentation. And they described some pretty dark things. One person even attempted suicide at the foot of the stones. But Charles zeroed in on something else. So as I was reading through the answer to reports,

it mentioned that Central Dispatch Office, the EAT 911 Albert County 911,

had access to a camera that's out there that not only that access to a camera,

they were able to rewind so they could see footage that footage was saved on a DVR. The high res footage from those cameras, the ones trained on the guidestones day and night would be the holy grail. The GBI had only released a few grainy clips to the public. But there was clearly more. Maybe much more.

In the records, Charles found the model of the security cameras. And from the specs, he knew that they recorded in high resolution.

“If you could get that raw footage, I could hold the key to finding out just how exactly the”

guidestones were destroyed. I've requested any footage that is on their DVR, but not heard back yet. I didn't expect we'd ever hear back, but then one day, I got a message from Charles. Megan and I are in a parking lot, right outside the Emergency Services Control Center in Elburton. We're supposed to meet someone here for a handoff.

Yeah, hi, we're looking for Beth Seymour. Oh, there we go. Wow, the control center. The counting had gotten back to Charles about his request for the guidestones raw security footage. And they said we could have it.

So we're here to pick it up. This is the biggest break we've had on the explosion and it's still a little hard to believe. Hi Beth. Hi Tyler McBride from the Jc. Good, how are you? Good, how are you?

Good, how are you? We're here to pick up the footage that you so nicely tracked down for us. She hands us an envelope with a jump drive in it. Great, thanks. I hope this wasn't too much travel.

I have to find it, yeah.

“Do you still get a lot of calls about them or kind of tapered off, yeah?”

In the beginning of the first year or so after they were destroyed, we had a lot of them.

A lot of tips, maybe? Or? No, not really, just, uh, the idling of this game. That's a tip. But hopefully when you came all the way to the side of the road, we'll appreciate it. Yep, and thank you. You're welcome, it's good to meet you.

Yeah, it was good to meet you. Thank you very much. We had the jump drive, but we really didn't know what was on it. It could have been the same two videos we'd already seen. We needed to see what we had right away. But we were also starving.

We're Tyler. Thank you. We decided to pull into the local zaxbies just down the road. We ordered two chicken fingers meals with extra zaxos and slip into a booth with a laptop and plug in the jump drive. All in all, there are seven files of raw footage to go through.

All right, I'm just going to start. Are you ready? Yep. Is there a volume? I don't know yet, are you ready? Yeah.

Okay, it's 44 seconds. Yes, there is volume. I can hear the quicker. Is that a guy with a cooler?

I know. Oh my god. Yeah, there's a person running away. They did not release this footage.

Most of the files are shots we've never seen before.

There's a clear view of a person walking up to the guidestones, replacing a large container on the ground and sort of weirdly running away. Is he ready to see this one? Maybe not, maybe no, this is 29 seconds. Maybe when they blow up. Yeah.

I just want them to blow up. Sorry, that was so loud. Okay, ready? Whoa, I've never seen that angle either. Whoa, the sign on the fence is like hanging off.

“Oh, is there anything we can see in the tree line back there?”

We back it up.

Oh, there it goes, the car.

And there's a clip of the getaway car, speeding away. Right through the middle of the frame. It looks like it's a silver sedan. Also, this is a good 10, this is a good 20 minutes after they set it down. We can get a good sense of the sequence of events.

The videos are all timestamped. It seems like the person who set the container down took some time before detonating, whatever, wasn't it? Is this a different angle? Slater.

This is when they're about to blow up. I just can't see anything in the tree line. It's so dark over there. I know now, I just want to go back and like, Whoa, the lightning?

Oh, yeah. And one more thing. There are clear shots of lightning in the distance, which is wild. Plenty of people have told us that the guidestones were destroyed by an act of God, like lightning. But it definitely was not the lightning that set off this blast.

That person is really not in black. The person doesn't seem like they're trying that hard. Yeah, better, better than what we would have been working with. No, it was a lot more than I thought we would get. Do you want to go slow?

Uh, no, I'm a bad woman. I don't want it, but you didn't have sweeties, so. That's true. I am a bad southerner. So salty, so good. I'm tapping out. Do you want my toast?

Truth is power. Knowledge is power. Information is power.

“And if you want to hold elected officials accountable,”

if you want to know how to make the most informed decisions, then you have to have facts. You have to have good information. And politically Georgia provides all of that. We bring you, not just the biggest news, but also the analysis of why it matters to you. I love to tell people to think globally, but focus locally.

Follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So you never miss an episode of politically Georgia.

This is It's UATL. Whatever you mean to you, we are talking to that specific community. You're unscripted on a apologetic weekly dose of black culture, straight from the heart of Atlanta. Our show is hosted by reporters from UATL.

An HAC publication that is dedicated to amplifying black culture. In every week we're diving into anything that touches black life.

“That's right, that's right, that's right, that's why it's 16.”

Welcome to It's UATL. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. Some of the surveillance videos are downright creepy. Seeing a figure appear out of the darkness of the tree line. In the middle of the night, carrying a heavy container is creepy enough.

But it's even creepy you're watching it and knowing that the container was filled with explosives. But what kind? Dynamite? TNT? Could knowing exactly what's in that container help us find the person holding it? We needed an expert. Someone who knows their explosives.

I still go ua like everybody else and say wow that was like super cool or wow those are like

or like you know what kind of copper mixture did they have to use to get that green?

“This is Scott Swedo. He's retired bomb expert.”

He spent about 30 years studying explosives of all kinds. Major bombings and fires things like a world trade center, Oklahoma City Bombings, Centennial Olympic Park, that sort of thing. What I've come to understand is there are a few different sorts of explosives experts. They're not all in the field defusing bombs. Scott is more on the chemistry lab

end of this spectrum. My last assignment was running the terrorist explosive device and electrical center or T-DAC which is an FBI led forensics laboratory that specializes in counterterrorism. It's essentially the Indiana Jones laboratory. When you see that scene at the end of the rages of the law stark,

“the gigantic government warehouse full of stuff, that's what we have except it's bomb evidence”

from all over the world going back literally decades. I sent Scott the guidestone surveillance footage before we called him today. He emailed me back right away. There was no subject line and just one word. Wow. I'm getting the feeling like we've almost asked Sherlock Holmes to investigate like a shoplifting incident or something. The match of expertise to the incident.

But let's do it. Yeah. I think the first one we're going to tee up is the farthest one away,

the farthest angle, and then we can move in a bit closer. But we we would love to, I think, just play the clip and then hear you walk through, yeah, deduce and what questions you have

“etc. Okay. Let's do it. We play Scott the video from far away first. It's the one that's got the”

best view of the explosion. Okay. Yeah. Scott, what did you see there? Very little light. With that, so you're talking about literally pounds of high explosives based on the immediate amount of smoke and the debris that you could kind of see moving around. But then you'd notice kind of the gray colored smoke. So for instance, just looking at that alone, you would say, all right, well, I don't necessarily know what it is, but it's not likely to be

something like TNT or certainly not anything like a plastic explosive. And the reason for that is with a plastic explosive detonation, something like C for you get immediate black smoke. I mean,

just this inky black smoke with a bright orange fireball. Scott says what he sees from this first video

helps him rule out what sort of explosives were not used. The color of the smoke alone rules out the theory that something like dynamite from one of the local quarries might have been used. And there's something else too. This one you can actually see the the target, the the granite kind of obelisk or slabs was almost instantly shattered. Scott says the way the guidestone's shattered rules out another type of explosive. Something he calls a low explosive. An explosive that doesn't

detonate, but burns like fireworks. That implies that some sort of a high explosive was used. It literally pulverized a good chunk of it and sent that debris flying backwards. But then we just got a different vantage point. One where you can actually see a person walking up to the stones and setting something down. And that really narrows the possibilities for Scott. In this video, you can see somebody wearing dark clothing, carrying what kind of looks like a big

cooler with both hands. The guidestone's blocked the view as they approach, but you can hear the sound when they set the tub down. Yeah, kind of a thud. I hadn't heard before. Yeah, which sounds like it's something heavy. And that implies that it either somebody like slammed it down to the ground, like literally threw it on the ground, which generally explosives don't like to be insulted like that. They don't like to be rough handled, but it literally kind of goes boom. And it hits the ground.

That implies you have a fair amount of weight. But there's one other possibility. And that is exploding target mixtures. You can buy these things. There are lots of trade names for them. You know, one trade name that many people have heard of and it's certainly not saying that it was involved in this case is Tannerite. Tannerite is the brand name. But Scott says there are other

It's meant to be detonated with a gun. So someone's shooting at it with a rifle,

“typically a high-powered rifle, and the energy of that bullet smacking into the exploding target”

mixture is enough to cause the explosive mixture to detonate. My first thought was that I didn't

hear a gun shot in the footage. But Scott explained that even at a healthy distance, the bullet is traveling so fast that the sound of the gun shot and the explosion would be indistinguishable. You could be two or three hundred yards away with something that's the size of that big, big plastic-looking container, and you're absolutely going to hit it if you have any skill, whatsoever. The way Scott breaks it down, it kind of doesn't sound that special.

The materials he thinks were used to blow up the stones are at particularly rare or sophisticated.

But someone who would actually go through with it, he says that's unusual.

“Because bombings are so rare in the United States, any time somebody”

goes out of their way to get explosives, any time that kind of an attack occurs, it's considered pretty significant. Going out there, caring what is obviously a large amount of explosives that's very heavy, you have some real thought process is going on that you are going to want to use that level of force against a target. It's not splashing paint on it, blasting it with a shotgun a few times to popmark the thing,

vandalizing it, you want to blow it up. That takes some real rage and some real hostile energy directed against someone. Scott says, there are multiple serious crimes involved in the guide stones bombing. But one thing that's not a crime, possessing large amounts of exploding target mixture, he says there are very few regulations against having it. And in Georgia, you can get it pretty

much anywhere. Okay, so if you look at exploding target mixtures, you can buy that stuff in bulk. You could literally go on Google right now, Google exploding target mixtures, and then you get your credit card, you buy it, and it literally shows up at your doorstep.

“This is hard to believe. Could it really have been this easy to blow up a monument so massive?”

I had to be sure. It was time for a little hands-on journalism. Test one, two, test one, two, all right, it's working. Let's go buy some dinner right. That's Charles Minchew. AJC's data reporter who you heard from earlier in the episode, we asked him to go through the motions that the guide stones bomber went through. We wanted to know firsthand how easy it is to get the amount of exploding target mixture

that would have been needed to destroy the stones. Charles, as I said earlier, is a desk guy. But he's also a team player, and he agrees to head to his local academy sports on a Sunday. All right, so let's go and get stuff if they even have it. Not sure if they do. [Music playing] It is very cold today.

Take them in our arms out of the store. Charles walks in casually. No one really greets him. He walks past the footwear,

the duck blinds, and the decoys. Until finally, he arrives at the aisle where they sell

exploding target mixture. There's really only one brand on the shelves. We're on a budget, so Charles checks to see if there are any deals. Oh, here we go. Right here, half pound brick, one pound brick, extreme range. That's $20 for that. Get 10 pounds for $75. Hey, you Megan. I'm actually in a academy right now, and instead of just talking to myself,

I just wanted to talk. That's the one on the phone for a minute. When I'm looking right here, you know, I can buy half pound of it, but I can also buy this

to just do it. Actually, 20 pounds right here for $119. I didn't even see. And it just says,

“we bring the boom on the box. It's their sniper shot series. Yeah, you want to buy the big box?”

And I can expensive. When Charles gets up to the register, the cashier doesn't even know what he's buying. Hey, Hari. I'm been a real pretty good heavy year than I thought it was going to be. Even though I know what it says, 20 pounds. Yeah. I think it's been a while since I've seen people do

some crazy stuff with it though that I would never try. Yeah. I'm not that stupid, not that kind of a

death wish. Oh, print please. Thank you so much. Have a good one. So that did not take long at all. I was not going to buy this much, but it was very easy. Charles is theoretically now in possession of enough explosives to blow up a small car. And he could have bought more.

“We could have won. Are you some recording? Yeah. I'm still recording. You could have walked out of”

there. There was another box. She didn't check my ID. The cashier didn't even know what it was.

I said, I walked enough. And I said, this is heavy in that thought. She's like, what is it? I said,

well, it's like, you know, exploding targets. You can shoot, you know, decide a rifle or whatever, you know, just, you know, some people do stupid stuff with it. You know, so it was really easy. We were able to confirm from other sources that Scott Suito was right. It was, in fact, tanner eight that was used in the bombing of the guidestones. Going into this case, we thought whoever did this had to be steeped in explosive expertise.

Maybe a quarry worker. Someone who handled dynamite. But theoretically, all Charles would need now is a YouTube video showing him how to mix the tanner eight, a gun, and a getaway car. Obviously, Charles isn't about to do any of that. It's one thing for someone to know how to commit a crime or even have the means to commit that crime. It's another thing entirely to go through with it. The person I watched in the surveillance footage, who walked up to the base of the guidestones

with a heavy container of explosives. What were they thinking in that moment? When the guidestones blew up, and they sped away. That's next episode.

It's somebody in the moment. Hey, I don't know. It was never in me to think somebody blew these

things up, and that should be held accountable. That felt like the GBI was lying. Why are they lying to people? They won't be attacked. They won't let me look at what was the deal. When they forgot what it was, very angry.

“That's next episode. On who blew up the guidestones?”

Who blew up the guidestones is produced by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and goat radio? Got a tip? Just want to leave us a message? Call our hotline at 912302. Boom. That's 912302. 2666. The show was written and reported by me, Tyler McBrion, with Megan Adalski, Ian N. Wright, and Charles Menchew. Samantha Stamler is head of audio. Megan Adalski is our series lead, and Ian N. Wright is our senior producer. The show was produced

by Kira Bodengolagorski, Kara Shillin, and Charles Menchew, with production support from Shane Backler, Samir Jafari, Allison Shine, Corley Barrow, and Mariana Castro, original theme music by Pauli Glam, additional composition from Ian N. Wright, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fill Rebibero created the show's artwork. Special thanks to the AJC's Thomas Lake, Chris Joyner, and Charles Menchew. Be sure to listen and download the rest of the series, and keep an eye out for more from the

AJC coming soon. Thank you for listening.

- It's going to be a little bit too long. - Now, let's try it out. Steps down.de/alljobs. Steps down. einfach die richtigen talentefinden für alle Jobs.