On the Matter of Obtaining Military Weapons

This will be a very brief report, with a simple observation: all the weapons but one employed in the deaths of the five victims are easily obtainable through a variety of means by whoever cares to search them out. Further, anyone not well versed in their operation can acquire familiarity sufficient to get the job done in a relatively brief time. I reached these results by direct means. I went out and tried to do it myself. If these conclusions do not seem surprising to you, I beg to differ. The ease with which great quantities of combat materials can be acquired and made usable is pretty scary. We're not talking Saturday Night Specials here. These are sophisticated, efficient death machines, available to all for private combat of any sort.

The necessary unusual skills and exotic weaponry or equipment employed in these killings I'd list as follows, in approximate order of difficulty, either to obtain or to operate (or both):

l. Flame-throwing apparatus and napalm projectiles.

2. Small aircraft.

3. Hand grenade.

4. Detailed knowledge of camouflaged pit construction.

5. M-1 rifle.

Starting at the bottom, it's no big news that rifles are extremely common in Yuba City. It's an active hunting locale, and many more types of people participate than your expected notion of red-jacketed weekend kill-crazy fiends. The immediate area affords lots of opportunities for game of all sorts, pheasants, quail, ducks, lots of birds, and you don't have to go too far for deer, bear, elk, and other four-legged game. For at least half of the year, pick-up trucks with antlers sticking out the back are a sight too ordinary to notice, and everybody's freezer is stocked with venison steaks, rabbit, and whatever else has come their way. Packages of frozen game were a typical gift when paying a social call, and local butchers likely still do a fair business dressing and preparing meat brought to them fresh from the kill. Even the high school nickname for its sport teams, which is Honkers, indicates further the presence of local wildlife. As I said, it's a regular part of life here.

I didn't do that much hunting myself, but I did go maybe ten or fifteen times, mainly because friends asked me along. I shot quail at least twice, and my biggest tote was a morning when I took down three ducks. If a non-outdoorish sort like myself went that often, it shows how normal it is here for the general populace to be comfortable with rifles.

I have found no information as to whether Michael owned a rifle himself, or if anyone remembers his ever going hunting. All I'm speculating about here is what was available to him or what he could train himself to use easily. By those standards, the difficulty of acquiring and successfully operating a rifle, had he done neither previously, is very definitely a lowly, distant fifth on the list. If it's necessary to add, M-1 rifles, having been replaced by M-17's, are in abundant supply throughout the area, a standard government surplus item at sporting goods stores and gun shops.

As for the pit with the sharpened wooden poles, I mention it only because it has been reported that the method of construction was identical to the way it was done in Vietnam. Similarities include number of poles employed (sixteen, in four rows of four), the approximate length each projected from the ground (twenty inches, or four more that the average width of a prone human body), manner of sharpening, the use of human excrement to contaminate the ends of the poles, and form of camouflage. The question, here, then, would be how a civilian could be capable of such close imitation.

The answer to that one has come from several quarters. Discounting direct assistance from persons who might have Vietnam combat experience, in format ion on how to set one of these up was still not difficult to find. In an article from the San Francisco Examiner (located for me by a Yuba City librarian named Mrs. Edith Claridge, already thanked warmly in the acknowledgements for frequent kindnesses), it was reported that a full description of the recommended methods for constructing these death pits can be found in a U.S. Government pamphlet. To be specific, according to the article, it can be ordered from the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., for $2.65, as booklet #36-455, "Methods of Guerilla Resistance in Wartime". The article also clarified one other point I had wondered about. Up to now, I had thought this was a method employed only by the enemy in Vietnam, and through its being used in Yuba City, appeared to suggest the killer was identifying with (or at least employing) Viet Cong tactics. This report, however, does say that it was extremely common for both sides to booby-trap roads where enemy troops were expected to follow shortly. While the American and South Vietnamese methods were more customarily to employ land mines and other trip-cord devices, these kinds of pits were employed as well.

Another good story about the death pits comes from a book also located for me later by the kindly Mrs. Claridge, called Nights of Fire, Days of Darkness by PFC Brian Starkwell (Heathridge and Sons, 1976), a rambling, anecdotal account of one soldier's Vietnam experiences. The book is overlong and suffers from inattentive editing, but often one finds nicely drawn accounts giving a credible feeling of everyday life and death for the average recruit, if the reader can suffer through the long passages of banal, undramatic moralizing in order to reach those more precisely drawn vignettes. Anyway, Starkwell tells (pages 114-117) of being assigned to a unit whose task it was to prepare these pits on the perimeters of roads into secured villages prior to the departure of American troops. Incidentally, while Starkwell's description of how the pits were constructed is hardly clinical in detail, the how-to-do-it oriented reader could pretty much grasp the essentials. Such material could be one standard bit of stock-in-trade in these Army confessionals, which I myself confess to having read hardly any of. It does appear that sources besides the government were fairly free in filling in the picture of how these things worked, naturally enough I think, as the extensive use of the primitive death device and its apparent effectiveness even in a highly technological war was bound to be a matter of considerable interest. One of Starkwell's points, though, and I leave it up to you to decide if there's any truth to the tale, is that imprecise records were kept of the location of the American-built traps, when records were kept at all, which was not too bright a thing to do in a war which saw considerable shift of territorial control and frequent manpower movement. As a result, according to Starkwell, our soldiers were as likely to risk death in traps originally built by Americans, and he reports on at least two occasions where he knows with certainly that pits he had helped prepare led to American casualties. Starkwell's book is full of stories about misplaced bombings and other administrative screw-ups which led to deaths, but the story of the pits strikes me as especially tragic, given the crudely inefficient and painful method of killing that must be.

Starkwell's other funny pit story concerns a march his platoon took on short rations, which led to an inability during the preparation of the pit for any of them to be able to produce the necessary excrement to properly contaminate the poles. A contribution was finally solicited from the commander of a near-by squad, prompting Starkwell's buddies to break up in that wry, typically Army form of humor about how they always knew that guy was full of shit anyway. Well, If you go for that sort of stuff, Starkwell's book is not a bad read.

To finish off the matter of the pit, then, it does appear that once one delves into the subject, the information is readily accessible. I don't think Michael, or anyone else for that matter, would be dumb enough actually to order the pamphlet directly from the Government Printing Office, but who knows if real records of those purchases are kept anyway. That it would be possible to construct an effectively functioning model of this device seems fairly apparent. Also, if we live in an age when plans for workable atom bombs can be concocted by a college student out of available government materials, then it's no surprise that plans for so rudimentary a killing method as this are not considered a highly classified secret.

I don't think it's off the subject to mention here the matter of the poles found in Michael's garage which have allegedly served as the most tangible bit of evidence linking Michael to any of the killings. I'll bring this up here, in case I don't have a spot to do it later. All I wish to point out is that if ever there were a bit of potential evidence ripe for planting as part of a frame-up, this would be it. Again I'm not in any way suggesting Michael is not the principal guilty party in these murders, but something still smells about the discovery of these poles, and it's not the excrement. It's simply more than a little difficult to believe that a murderer capable of this complex a series of killings would be that stupid. If it was indeed an oversight on Michael's part, it's so blatant an error that one would have to wonder seriously if it might not have been intentional Either way, deliberately planted by the police or purposely ignored by Michael, it's a crucial moment in this case that would demand further scrutiny at some point and by someone more able than I to find out what happened. And that's enough on the poles.

The hand grenades are next up in trickiness, but still do not pose formidable difficulties. I did discover, much to my surprise, that items described as disarmed grenades are easily available as war surplus. I asked the owner of one of the stores selling them why anyone would want to buy a disarmed grenade, and he didn't have much of an answer. "Kids mostly go for them. They must get some kick out of playing Army with 'em." A guy at a different place said they get used sometimes in student films or local theater productions, and that he's also seen a few people buy them as remembrances of their Army days. Why they buy them I can't really say, what I can say is that they are around readily.

What's the difference between an armed and a disarmed

grenade you ask? The answer is, apparently, not very much. There are small timing devices which can be purchased separately, and affixing these would be one step in making them operable again. You'd have to know a little bit about what you're doing, as the timers aren't sold as having been extracted from grenades, but a person knowing what they were up to could definitely get the parts. At that point, the only missing ingredients are some explosives, but a surprisingly small amount is all that goes into a grenade. Most of the damage from one of these gadgets comes not from its firepower, but from the fragmenting of the lead pieces which give the grenade its pineapple-like appearance. Simple gunpowder could do an adequate job, or so I was told in one store when I hypothetically posed the case. We should also remember that a particularly strong charge would not have been needed under the circumstances, as the killer was reasonably certain to land the grenade in the front Seat of the car just about directly in the driver's lap. Still, anybody who's seen what's left of that car knows that something serious hit it, though it may also be badly damaged from the ensuing crash, the two forms of destruction now indistinguishable. Just for the record, the materials are there to put grenades back together again.

Another quite simple method, of course, could have been to steal one of the genuine articles. I did go talk to a guy down at the local National Guard Armory, at the corner of D and 6th Streets, and somewhere in our chat about the town (with me making repeatedly clear I was a local kid myself, and not one of those snoopy outsiders) I asked him whether they used grenades in their Guard training. He said they were standard issue for combat exercises, and they also wore them, oddly enough, during domestic riot control situations. He thought they had them on then more to scare people into realizing they meant business than with any intention of using them. I flashed back in my mind to a picture of Kent State, and at least up there in my head the guardsmen do have grenades on their belts, though I haven't verified this by going back to look at the real pictures again. That's pretty scary to me, the idea that guardsmen go running around with a mess of grenades on their hips. I did agree with the guy that maybe" that was a pretty effective way of showing people serious things could happen if they didn't follow instructions. Well, the point of this is, grenades are still very much around, and if they're issued to reservists and guardsmen and other one-weekend-a-month soldiers, getting hold of one would be no serious problem. I'm not saying this was the method

employed. I'm just trying to show how many avenues there were to get to the same destination.

One last possibility on this grenade matter, of course, is that it might not have been an actual regulation grenade at all. Any small exploding device which could be tossed by hand would certainly produce the same appearance. All we know for certain is that something was thrown into David Smith's car that blew it and him to smithereens. There has been no official verification that the device was indeed a regulation Army hand grenade. No one has said that the remnants of one were located in the wreckage. When I went to see Smith's car, I did know enough to check for evidence of shrapnel, but I admit I wasn't sure what shrapnel would look like if I did find it. That could make me seem not too bright again, but at least it shows I had a notion of what I ought to have looked for, which should count for something. So, if we don't know whether it was a real grenade, all I'm saying is that any homemade device could have produced the same result, and we all realize how easy those things are to come up with. Every crackpot terrorist, from mad bombers to Puerto Rican nationalists to Basque separatists to you-name-them has managed to manufacture quite functional explosive devices. I'm sure that's no big news either, but that's my point. There must be specialty stores around by now catering to that sort of clientele, if not mail-order catalogs.

By this time in my weapons travels, I noticed that what little pretense of concealment the guys following me had maintained was not abandoned entirely. Instead of acting stealthy, they were each too busy scribbling like mad in a small notebook they'd pass along to their replacement when their shift ended. I could have been kind of stupid to go to gun shops and Guard armories while I was being followed by FBI agents. I had more to worry about than being stupid.

This gets us to the possibly sticky matter of the airplane, and I won't go too far into this one because, honestly, I don't know that much about it. I do have a little to report, however. To start, there isn't an official public airport as such in either Yuba City or Marysville, but there are three small private airfields. Also, as mentioned earlier, since it is so heavily an agricultural area, there are numerous small planes kept behind barns and used for crop-dusting or inspection purposes. (I did check on whether Sharon Willetts' farm had a plane. As far as I can tell, they don't.) At each of the private airfields, there are licensed instructors available for private lessons. The going rate is somewhere between $450 and $500, which gives twenty-five hours of the lessons and flight time necessary before one would be capable of soloing. I asked the instructor at one of the fields if he happened to know Michael Willetts. His answer was, "You're not the first fellow to ask me that." He didn't give me a straight yes or no, and I still don't know if Michael might have been able to fly a plane himself. It is known, though, that he was not a licensed pilot, although that did not preclude his having the training without the official license.

This would also be an obvious time to make reference again to Beale Air Force Base, which is so imposing a local presence I'm surprised I've managed to mention it so infrequently. Apart from it being a likely nearby source for all the materials necessary for these crimes, it's also a location a plane might come from without attracting much attention. Beale itself as a place where Michael could have received assistance is another of those subjects somebody ought to look into sooner or later. (I'm not trying to provide too many instructions to subsequent investigators, so much as acknowledge the unavoidable limitations of my own work.) I have recorded earlier how the FBI has implied this possibility, through involving Beale Military Police in the investigation. It does seem unusual to have so large a military installation this close to where military-inspired killings occurred. It would almost be more strange if there were no connection whatever between the Base and these deaths.

However it might have worked, I've got to admit that the airplane matter is a tricky subject. It doesn't seem possible that a plane could fly around right in the middle of these other deaths and be able entirely to escape detection, and it seems equally unlikely that an unlicensed recently trained pilot might have managed this on his own. I don't think I'm being overly speculative in stating that it still seems like it could have been done, though I'd understand considerable skepticism on the basis of the skimpy material presented here. If I had other ways to figure it, or leads I could have checked out, I'd have done it. Inspiration doesn't always remain at the same high-pitched level. I still think I'm doing pretty good here, even if I have my obvious lapses.

This brings us to the final blaze of glory, if you'll pardon a rather tastelessly employed expression. Getting a flame-throwing device in operable condition and knowing how to use it would be the toughest part of this whole maneuver. I can see why the murders began here. Once this was accomplished, anything was possible, both on a technical level and in terms of the potential military horrors that could have been on their way. You start with a thing like this, then it's clear there isn't going to be much fooling around.

Figuring out ways this part could have been managed wasn't easy. Some of the more predictable routes ended fast. The devices, or parts for them to be assembled, aren't available through war surplus sources. While it was possible to find some photographs of flame-throwing equipment, and some descriptive material about them, there did not appear either to be any government sources for methods to construct them or places to find detail accounts of how they operated. I realized too that while we all know that these things were used a lot in Vietnam, we don't really have much sense of what they look like. I mean, you've probably seen some of those same films I have of napalm devices in operation, but could you describe the weapons when the flames aren't shooting out of them? Try to picture it. I doubt if you could. I'll tell you briefly, not that you'd have much reason for wanting to know. Basically, they resemble fairly large vacuum cleaners, although some of the more portable models are built to be worn principally around the waist, ending in about the same kind of hose-and-nozzle attachment the larger models have. The apparatus functions basically to propel the gel-consistency napalm substance out through the tube, where at the end a series of electric coils heat it to flammable levels. A rather grisly aspect of the propelled substance, and I think they used to talk about this back when napalm was a hot subject (couldn't help that one either), is that the burning material that's emitted has a considerable capacity for sticking upon whatever it comes in contact with. It isn't just flames being thrown, in other words, the burning jelly gets there too, so that whatever it hits will keep burning even when the flame-thrower has moved elsewhere.

The easiest part of setting one of these up, though still pretty tough, is the manufacture of napalm-like material. I asked my old chemistry teacher about it, and while he's something less than an authority on the subject and wasn't completely certain himself, he thought that a compound with the properties of napalm was within the reach of a somewhat imaginative chemistry student. (Actually, I did do a fairly lengthy interview with him. He retired two years ago. He's a very nice man named Anthony Perkins, no relation to the actor. I'm not including the interview itself, because he talks mostly about his retirement and how much he hated teaching. His more important points will still be summarized here.) He thought napalm itself was a pretty complex product, but that something resembling it sufficiently was possible, the main differences being the home-brew wouldn't burn as long and wouldn't have quite the adhesive power of the name brand, The funny part, I thought, of how he described the simplest process of home-manufacturing a substance that would work about the same, is that you'd begin by melting down a bunch of plastic wrap. He said you'd have it serve as the viscous base for the remaining materials. (Don't ask me what a viscous base is. All I did was write it down.) As you might remember, Dow Chemical was a major anti-war target because it was a well-known napalm manufacturer, also highly visible in campus recruiting activities. Dow today, while presumably out of the napalm business, continues to be big in plastic wrap. Next time you buy some Handiwrap, notice the name of the corporation that makes it. So, it sounds like if the need for napalm were to rise again, Dow would be ready for an easy changeover. I also wondered if plastic wrap was itself originally a by-product of napalm research, which would be further evidence for the technological breakthroughs that wars engender, the same sort of argument we've heard about the consumer products that space nuts claim as a valuable result of NASA research, World War II brought us tape recorders, the moon shot led to upside-down writing pens, and Vietnam improved our plastic wrap. That does sound possible, if off the subject.

My old chemistry teacher offered to try to make up a batch of the stuff for me. I told him I didn't think that would be necessary, but it was really sweet him to volunteer. He was a terrific teacher, even if he's become embittered in his old age, and I probably enjoyed seeing him again about as much as I did anyone in Yuba City. Thank you for your help, Mr. Perkins, and have a nice retirement.

How adept at matters chemical Michael Willetts might be is another of those unknown quantities, except that in high school he was really first-rate at both physics and chemistry. His high school transcript, which I was able to look at through channels I will not divulge, indicates that in his senior year he took the Educational Testing Service Advanced Placement Test in Chemistry, and scored 785. That's an incredible result, since the top possible score on all those tests is 800, and the Advanced Placement exams are designed especially to indicate levels of aptitude for college level work. I don't know how much chemistry Michael did in college, I doubt if it was very much, but he obviously had the smarts. Then again, he was good in so many things that you could rule out very little on the basis of finding some weakness in his possible areas of capability. It's not entirely fair to say that because he was so smart he could have handled all these things, except that he was so smart. It just sounds odd for it to be held against him. If he was more apparently stupid, he wouldn't be so tailor-made for the role of master-criminal. I guess such can be the potential price for ample brains. In Michael's case, though, anyone making extravagant claims for his talents should have to explain how he wound up a nine-fingered accountant in Yuba City, not very rich, divorced, and probably quite unhappy. He wasn't the picture of small town success before this happened, so we shouldn't have to hear how easily and naturally he could have undertaken these grandiose endeavors. If he were that smart, he might have figured how to avoid this mess in the first place.

Also, while it's entirely possible to discuss these murders in a very clinical fashion, it still ought to be said that plotting to incinerate a guy is a bit different from solving a chemistry problem. There's got to be something missing in you to do it at all. I'm not talking about whether what he did was right or wrong, I mean the kind of coldness necessary to being sufficiently composed to set up and go through with the murders. For me, my voice would quiver like mad talking to a National Guardsman about whether they had any grenades around, or asking an instructor how much flying lessons cost. That's about my own personal limit for being able to function in pressure situations. The notion of going through with even one of these, no matter how fully justified, I couldn't help but find unbearable. Seeing the murder sites was enough to give me terrible dreams a couple of nights running, mental images of bloody corpses I'm certain to spend more nights with. Michael may have exorcised his recurrent nightmares by first making them reality and then having them inhabit the minds of the rest of us impressionable enough to be affected by the vision laid bare here that morning. It's one of those events, I guess like the Kennedy assassination or the Guyana massacre, whose images become a part of our deepest fears from that point on, whether we choose to keep them with us or not. The anxiety of being here afterward has been bad enough for me, the idea of seeing it happen, even if I wasn't the one who did it, would leave me catatonic. How a person would be capable of all five of these murders, just in terms of being able to remain a a reasoning being, is quite beyond my imagination. It's a staggering feat, however horrible, its own testament to human determination.

I won't stay on this jag much longer, but here in the midst of wondering about the weapons, I have to add that it may be that the complex logistics of the killings were the murderer's own barrier to protect himself from the enormity of his crimes. A simple preoccupation with getting lots of gadgetry to function properly could be a helpful diversion from the blood and guts right in front of you. And, so strong an enforced sense of their symbolic nature could have been his way of having also to remind himself why he was going through with each of the killings. How much harder, then, it might have been, to approach each of the five men and end their lives with a single bullet apiece. That could well be the more physically impossible to perform. This argument, though, may be just a variant of the line heard a lot during the Vietnam War, people who would say how much easier it was for our fliers to drop bombs on an enemy they never had to see, as if there was something far more morally repugnant about killing at a distance that eased the closer you got to your target and the more crude your instrument. People like that would only be satisfied by enemy deaths resulting from daytime face-to-face strangulation. So, what I'm saying I guess is that, yes, of course, dropping bombs from a B-52 is easier to perform that doing away with someone standing right in front of you, and a murder committed by reconstructing military weapons raises diverting technical problems From the notion of murder itself. Both forms of killing acknowledge that human beings may need mechanical reinforcement for their willingness to kill, having to hide what's being done as much from the people doing it as from their targets, however intent they may be on achieving their aims. If you can follow that, it probably explains why you've managed to read this far.

Meanwhile, back at the flame-throwing equipment, and the question of how one gets one's hands on it. This is last and very far from least, because when I reach here, the final problem, I stop cold. This one can't be done. The only thing that works like a flame-thrower device is a flame-thrower device. Nobody will tell you how to build it in adequate detail, and no matter how much of the incendiary goop you mix together starting from rolls and rolls of melted plastic, there's still no way to turn a person into charcoal briquets without the official government-issue product to deliver the goods. The end product is too dependent upon difficult-to-reproduce electronic circuitry, and manufactured pieces extremely hard to fashion in a garage workshop. If Michael, or whoever, figured out some way to do it, they're a lot smarter than I am. I'm prepared now to believe revenge could have waited over ten years for no other reason than it took Michael that long to figure out how to get all his materials in working order. If you want my opinion, anyone wishing to emulate these crimes, as Michael predicted would happen, ought to get a solid college education, majoring in one of the physical sciences, or at the very minimum, put in a couple of years at a serious technical school. Even if you're able to get a lot of help in setting up your version of this, prepare to put a long time in on dozens of details requiring attention before you can get on with it. The paperwork alone must be a prodigious chore.

Returning to the flame-thrower, I see further evidence for it having to have been the real thing in the lack of testimony so far that any unusual machine noises were heard. This corresponds to the genuine weapons, which were designed and built to function relatively quietly, the only noise being that good old whoosh to let the victim know what the bright colors coming his way were all about. The quietness was due primarily (to simplify the explanation of what little I know a bit) to a chemical propellant pressure-packed in small aluminum canisters. Mixed with the gel in a vacuum tube, this was what got the stuff going with a jet-like rush. The only substitutes for this in a homemade version that I was able to think of, or anyone else I asked could come up with either, would involve some pretty noisy mechanical apparatus: electric motors (like a small vacuum cleaner motor, for instance), some hose attached to a car exhaust, or a pressure pump kind of contraption like a swimming pool filter motor. All of these would lead to a rather inelegant, jerry-built device, and more importantly, would not work very effectively. You might kill a guy with one, but not flame him to cinders as rapidly as happened here.

If anything, the intensity of the flame in this case was a good deal more than normally produced. Napalm victims have never, in any accounts I've found, been so totally annihilated. That's probably because the device is rarely used at such close range. In war, anybody that close trying to employ a flame-thrower would have been finished off himself. Also, if a regulation device was used here, it might not have been employed properly. This was the one piece of equipment that probably couldn't have been tested out too extensively in advance by an inexperienced operator without drawing a great deal of attention. Then again, the dramatic intensity, in two senses of the word, may have been quite intentional. Given the painful extremities of all the murders, that wouldn't be too out of character.

If this was a real flame-thrower and not a home-built job, where it came from is still anybody's guess. These devices are no longer regulation issue, like the hand grenades, and there doesn't seem to be a local supply of any sort. It's a plain mystery, and I'm sorry I can't neatly tie together the conclusions of this chapter by saying how simply all the stuff could have been procured and that even a dummy like me could do it. Well, even a dummy like me couldn't do it.

I should say, in a slight variation on a point that came up in the Roger Templeman interview, it doesn't take too much research into Army weaponry during the Vietnam War to breathe a slight sigh of relief that the killer chose to exercise some restraint in choice of killing devices. This might sound to some like saying it's lucky Attilla the Hun didn't have guided missiles, but what I mean is that, granted there was a certain viciousness or ferocity in each manner of death, there was a kind of determined attention that no one other than the intended targets be harmed. This was a concern, we can note, at odds with so many reports during the War, where it became routine to hear about massive civilian casualties due to poor information on bombing targets or carelessness on the part of American troops. If the killer tried to emulate his source of inspiration more closely, a few innocent bystanders might have wound up dead in these skirmishes. There were also quite a considerable number of weapons alternatives that must have been equally as accessible or possible to recreate, the use of which could have easily made things a lot worse, and might have brought even more attention to the killings than they received. Again not to give too much credit to the murderer for refusing to be more kill-crazy, some of these choices are worth a brief mention.

Most surprising to me are the absences of chemical defoliants, poison gases, and the controversial anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. The first two should be considered as one, since the use of poison gas per se is outlawed by the Geneva Convention. It was charged during the War that chemical defoliants, supposedly employed only to prevent ground cover from growing and thereby obscuring enemy troops, could not only keep the troops from hiding but also could leave no one breathing who would be able to hide. What I find interesting about the defoliants is there'd be a rough justice, one could argue, in bringing that part of the war back home too, if that was one of the things attempted by these killings, since Yuba City is in the midst of so agricultural an area. If a plane was available, as indeed it was, using it to spread a little of this easily concoctable stuff would have been a simple means to kill one of the five, since several were out in farm areas a good deal of the time anyway.

My best guess on why defoliants were rejected is that it breaks from the pattern of violent physical mutilation which so clearly runs through the murders. That kind of death would have left a neat corpse, as decidedly did not result from any of the methods finally employed. Chemicals and gases of these sorts might also have been more difficult to control, to use in seeking out a single victim. Still, like Roger Templeman, I wonder why this one went by the wayside. Well, it might also be that there was only room for five.

The fragmentation bombs would certainly fit snugly in the pattern of disfiguring, gory deaths. That's what they were supposed to have been devised for. Also, it appears that explosive devices of this sort are extremely simple to prepare. One easy way, so I was told, is to pack a bunch of lead sinkers used for fishing around any kind of small explosives. It might be again that it would be very difficult to restrict your casualties to one once all the crud started flying, or I see how a hand grenade itself, if a single death is what you're after, could be considered an anti-personnel weapon in miniature. I also find some interest in the idea that the killer didn't use a bomb of this sort because they were so controversial. Only traditional, mainline killing devices were employed. That could be seen as playing by the rules, I guess.

One last method not employed that I still wonder about a little, if you don't mind reading about one more unused plan, is to ask why there was no attempt made to get all five of them together and kill the entire group in one fell swoop. There'd be something a little neater about that, but perhaps in terms of dramatic effectiveness it would have appeared a good deal more contrived. Also, under those circumstances it's impossible to imagine how each could have been killed by a different method, so the neatness of one way of doing it may have been sacrificed for the variety of the other. Killing all five within one hour may have sufficiently underscored the significant relationship between the five. Bringing them any closer together might have been showoffishness too outrageous for even this situation. After all, there ought to be limits in anything, even mass murder.

For that reason, I think it's unfortunate that the word "massacre" has been employed so frequently in connection with these killings. A massacre is like lining up a bunch of guys against a wall and mowing them down, that time on St. Valentine's Day being a good example. A massacre is all at once, as in My Lai Massacre, a lot of people in the same location killed en masse, often without distinguishing victims. Those are massacres. I don't see how this can reasonably be called a massacre, and it's not fair to the crimes to allow that label to be so easily attached. If anything, these deaths were overly calculated and too subtly executed, too un-massacre-like is what I'm trying to say. If you believe this doesn't make any difference, you're entitled to feel that way. I don't really think you're entitled, but I'm trying to be polite. I think only a massacre should be labelled a massacre.

That does it for one of the more speculative and superfluous portions of my work. I didn't entirely answer the question I set out to cover here, and I didn't go very far with the implications of that failure. If Michael couldn't have procured all the equipment and instructed himself in its use, where does that leave us? The answer may be nothing more mundane than his having gotten some assistance and/or instruction, perhaps unwittingly by people who had no idea of his intentions, or there could have been one or more fairly active co-conspirators. If there were, I still have no idea who they might be or why anyone else would have wanted to play a part in this intricate drama. That's admittedly a weak conclusion to this portion of my struggle to keep from sinking into the swamp of trivial information which is engulfing me at an ever accelerating pace.