One Summer: America, 1927

into the roadway,’ noted the Times reporter in a tone of some amazement.
    Matters actually worsened when the motorcade got moving. Many onlookers excitedly stepped into the road to try to get a better view, forcing the motorcycles to swerve dangerously. Several cars in the motorcade were involved in minor accidents, some repeatedly, often with each other, and the head of the motorcycle squadron, Sergeant William Cassidy, was thrown from his bike and into the side of the car carrying Ruth Snyder, causing her to shriek, but he suffered only minor injuries. Alderman Murtha’s car overheated and failed to make it out of the city, to the presumed disappointment of his wife and children. At length, Snyder and Gray arrived at Sing Sing, where they vanished through the gates and off the nation’s front pages. They would not be big news again until the following January when their execution was set.
     
    Then came the most shocking story of the summer.
    On the morning of 19 May, readers of the New York Times woke up to this headline:
     
    M ANIAC B LOWS U P S CHOOL ,
    K ILLS 42, M OSTLY CHILDREN;
    H AD P ROTESTED H IGH T AXES
     
    The maniac in question was one Andrew Kehoe, who until that day had been regarded by everyone who knew him in his home town of Bath, Michigan, as a sane and pleasant man. A graduate of Michigan State University, just down the road in Lansing, Kehoe farmed just outside town and was part-time treasurer of the local school board. He was so little suspected of anything untoward that a teacher from the school just the previous day had phoned and asked if they could hold a school picnic on his land. What the teacher didn’t know at the time of the call was that Kehoe either had slaughtered or was just about to slaughter his poor wife. What is certain now is that Andrew Kehoe had become severely unhinged. A bank was about to foreclose on his farm, an act he blamed on local school taxes, and he was poised to respond in the most chilling manner imaginable.
    In the early hours of 18 May, while the rest of Bath slept, Andrew Kehoe made repeated trips into the basement of the school carrying boxes of dynamite and pyrotol, a military explosive. Altogether he stacked 500 pounds of explosives throughout the basement. Then he wired them all together and ran a master line out to his car, parked out front. The following morning children arrived at school as on any normal day. Bath’s school educated children from every level, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. On this day, attendance was slightly reduced because it was graduation week and seniors had been given the day off, but otherwise the school was full.
    At 9.40 a.m., a sudden and tremendous explosion blew apart the building’s north wing, which housed the younger pupils. ‘Witnesses say that Kehoe sat in his automobile in front of the school and gloated as he watched the bodies of the children hurled into the air by his diabolical plot,’ the New York Times reported inhorrified tones. Ninety children were trapped in the wreckage, many seriously injured.
    As the whole town rushed to the scene, Kehoe tried to detonate a second cache of explosives in the boot of his car, but it failed to go off. Emory Huyck, the school superintendent, struggled with Kehoe to stop him from doing any more damage, but Kehoe managed to pull out a pistol and fire it into the boot, setting off another blast that killed him, Huyck and a bystander. Many others were injured. Altogether, forty-four people died that day: thirty-seven children and seven adults. Three families lost two children each. When firemen and policemen went through the building afterwards, they were astonished to find that several stacks of explosives under the building’s other wings hadn’t detonated. Had they done so, the death toll would have been in the hundreds.
    By coincidence, just across the fields from Bath was Round Lake, site of a summer cottage where Al Capone was often to be found, particularly when he needed to lie low because of police investigations. Capone had spent the whole of the previous summer there. At the time of the school massacre, however, he was in Chicago, representing the Italian-American community for the visit of the aviator Francesco de Pinedo. Another celebrity familiar with the locality was Babe Ruth, who had been arrested the previous June just down the road in the town of Howell for fishing illegally before the start of the season.
    After the massacre, it emerged