Cokeville Bombing: The Miracle That Was Almost The Worst US School Disaster

The Cokeville Elementary School hostage crisis happened 38 years ago on May 16, 1986, at Cokeville, Wyoming, when former town marshal David Young and his wife Doris took some 154 children and adults hostage.

After a three-hour standoff, a gasoline bomb the couple was carrying went off prematurely, injuring Doris Young while David Young was out of the room. Returning to the scene, David Young shot his wife, then himself.

All the hostages escaped and survived, though 79 were hospitalized with burns and other injuries.

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That’s the stale AI-generated Wikipedia recount of what was very nearly the worst school attack in American history. A “just the facts, ma’am” retelling of a hostage incident balanced on the edge of tragedy.

“I expected to see dead bodies everywhere, but I didn’t,” said bomb tech Rich Haskell, who heard over the radio the homemade device detonated as he sped to the scene.

There are so many “should haves” and “shouldn’t haves” associated with this story. Emergency agencies just happened to be gathered for a training in tiny Cokeville, population 500, at the time. And an explosion with the potential to destroy an entire school wing killed only the bombers and none of the kids and teachers.

“It just didn't go off the way it was supposed to. There should have been a horrendous explosion,” Haskell told investigators after he cleared the scene. “I’m not a religious man, but what you’ve got here is a miracle. There's no doubt in my mind that there was divine intervention."

The predominately LDS community of Cokeville in southwest Wyoming was perfectly willing to embrace the miracle angle. But leaning on faith, even for the devout, conjures hard-to-answer questions. If God saved Cokeville kids, why not Columbine? Where was he at Sandy Hook?

The incident spawned a couple of movies, TV shows, and numerous books. Much of that material has been sensationalized or is just plain inaccurate. A 10-year follow up by local media outlets was too painful for many in the Cokeville area to relive and participate in.

Since 1986, very little additional information has been added to the story of the Cokeville Elementary School bombing. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community controls much of the narrative, though they are quick to embrace all faiths with their declaration of a modern-day miracle.

Other aspects of the incident that many are aware of only through the movie are equally compelling. What drove a madman to perpetrate such a heinous act? What role did his teenage daughter play and what does she think about her father now? And how did a hardened cop, with little use for anything that could not be proved in court, come to believe the kids in that fated classroom were protected by angels?

Building A Perverted Profile

Everyone who knew him said David Young was a man too intelligent for his own good. He viewed everyone around him as intellectually inferior. He had difficulty maintaining meaningful relationships.

“He would just talk way above their heads or talk about things that did not make sense to your average person,” said Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office lead investigator Ron Hartley.

“He was the bookworm type, a genius, but his common sense just was zip,” Young’s first wife told the Arizona Republic.

She described Young as a non-drinker who claimed to be an agnostic. She added he was “gun crazy” and always had lots of firearms around.

David Young was also a meticulous journal-keeper, often recording minutiae like what he had to eat each day and when. In addition to some 43 diaries left behind in his van and hotel room, Young had also written several manifestos and pamphlets explaining his BNW (Brave New World) philosophies.

It was up to Hartley and an FBI behavioral analyst to pore over documentation left by Young after the Cokeville hostage crisis to try and figure out what made the bomber tick.

It was important to make some sense of Young’s bizarre anti-government ramblings just to rule out any terrorist threat connection to groups like the Aryan Nation.

After reading things like his “Zero Equals Infinity” treatise, investigators were fairly certain Young was acting alone.

The extensive amount of documentation found later in Young’s van and in a nearby hotel room also convinced Hartley that Young knew he was at the end of the line. He would not be coming out of the school alive.

At one point, after weeks of reading Young’s dark literature, Hartley was so deep down a rabbit hole he was afraid he was losing his mind.

“I've gone over this a thousand times, and I dream about it. I just can't understand what he's talking about,” Hartley told the FBI behavioral analyst.

The behavioralist answered, “’Well, let me tell you, the day you understand what this is talking about, I'll be seeing you professionally. Forget it. It doesn't make sense."

Kathy Davison, a 911 dispatcher and emergency management coordinator, also read some of Young’s diaries.

“They were horrible,” she said in a 2010 interview from the archives of the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources. “You could tell right away that he was a very possessive man. He talked about what his wife ate and how much she weighed. In her diaries, she said if she gained a pound, he punished her. He was a very controlling person.”

Kliss Sparks, a fourth grade teacher at the time of the incident, also read some of the journals in later years.

“It was absolutely malarkey. It did not make any sense. He was not normal,” she said.

In his writings, Hartley said Young also briefly mentioned a plan to hijack a plane. “He had no intention of, I guess, having a career in anything,” Hartley speculated.

Oddball Turns Outcast

As a high school student in Grinnell, Iowa, David Young easily achieved straight A’s. Except for one class: philosophy. He got his only C ever.

Fittingly, nothing seemed to conform to Young’s view of the world until he read Robert M. Pirsig's “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” After that, Young began down a murky path filled with views of an afterlife.

“That book was his bible,” Hartley said.

By the time Young hit his 30s, he was beginning to map out his guiding principles. He believed wholeheartedly in reincarnation, and that he could take others (Cokeville school kids) with him to a Brave New World as well material things like money.

Young was delusional. And dangerous.

“He was controlling. I was in fear of him all the time,” his daughter Princess told “One Year” Slate podcast host Evan Chung in 2022.

Princess was 19 years old at the time of the Cokeville bombing. A daughter by a previous marriage, she gradually saw signs her father was losing it, but still craved his approval.

Troubled Family Life

David Young bounced around from job to job, mostly in law enforcement. He was described as a “gun nut” wherever he went.

In 1979, Young got a job as town marshal of Cokeville. He lasted just six months — the probationary period — after which he was let go. He was accused of inappropriate relations with several women in town, as well as trying to peddle nude photographs of his preadolescent daughter.

In the short time he was in Cokeville, Young was also ridiculed behind his back. People mockingly called him “Wyatt Earp.” He wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and carried a long-barreled pistol in a holster strapped to his leg, like an Old West gunfighter.

He didn’t fit in.

Young did manage to marry a cocktail waitress named Doris during his brief stay in Cokeville. The family then moved to Idaho before eventually settling down in a doublewide trailer in Tucson, Arizona, where Young was constantly tinkering in the year leading up to the 1986 bombing.

“He was kind of a chemist, always doing research. He was collecting tuna cans and we didn’t know what he was doing with them. I mean, what do you need an old tuna can from?” Princess recalled in the Slate podcast.

Young plotted his school takeover for years. He called it, “The Biggie.” His wife, his daughter and two investor friends (a cousin named Gerald Deppe and hunting buddy Doyle Mendenhall of Preston, Idaho) had no idea what “The Biggie” actually was, but they all believed it had something to do with a get-rich-quick scheme.

The slick-talking Young had everyone convinced he was maybe working on a novelty energy source. He was, in reality, building a bomb.

It was in the Arizona desert that Young successfully tested a prototype. It worked flawlessly. He was ready.

Doomsday

On May 15, 1986, David Young gathered his team at a nearby hotel in Montpelier, Idaho. Princess remembers going into the bathroom and seeing a bunch of “weird stuff in the bathtub” — flour, tuna cans, string and clothespins — the makings of his ordnance from hell.

“Then he drops a bombshell on me that if I was to be part of the biggie, I had to sleep with him. And I said, ‘Fathers don’t do that to their daughters,’” Princess recalled in the podcast.

The rest of the night was nerve-wracking for Princess.

“From that point on, he was watching me like I was going to run. It got ugly,” she said.

The next day was a Friday. Young surveilled the school from a nearby hill using binoculars. The 42-year-old had reportedly considered Afton, Big Piney or La Barge, Wyoming, but settled on Cokeville. Young needed extremely bright students for his plan to succeed. More importantly, he wanted a small community with little law enforcement presence.

Once Young was sure all students at the K-6 school were inside the building, he revealed his plan.

Everyone was horrified; the investors, his wife and daughter.

“We were all like mouths dropped open. Like, what the hell is going on right now? All of us did not want anything to do with it. Even [my stepmom],” Princess said.

Young handcuffed the two unwilling investors to the inside of the van. He coerced his wife Doris to come along and got Princess to at least help wheel the bomb into the school and carry some guns.

“This is a revolution. I'm taking the school hostage,” Young told various teachers and administration at the school when he arrived.

“I saw all these little children’s faces running back and forth in a hallway. And I’m like, ‘How can I grab these children? How can I save them?’” Princess told Slate. “But of course, I was trembling so bad and I dropped a couple guns.”

Daughter Defects

Princess began crying uncontrollably.

First grade teacher Janelle Dayton remembers what happened next.

This young woman, very pretty young woman, was just hysterical. She screamed at David and said, ‘I can’t believe that you’re going to go through with this!’” Dayton said.

Several eyewitnesses remembered Young tossing the keys to the van to his daughter, saying something to the effect, “You’ve been a good kid but you’re no daughter of mine.”

“Is that all you have for me? I’ve been a good kid?” Princess said, in tears. “I grabbed the keys and I jumped in the van and I almost wrecked just getting it out of the parking lot.”

She drove straight down Main Street and burst into Town Hall.

“I started screaming that I needed help, and nobody wanted to listen to me. I used some very harsh curse words,” Princess admitted.

Firefighter Kevin Walker remembers it well. He and several others had just finished a meeting regarding spring flooding in the area. It was about 1 p.m. when an exasperated Princess stormed in.

“You stupid fucking people! What in the hell is the matter with you? Don’t you give a fuck about your kids? My father’s over there and he’s going to blow them all up!” Walker remembers a frantic Princess telling him.

Walker answered, “You don’t need to use that language here. We’re in a public building. Now if this was Chicago, I’d believe you. We’re in downtown Cokeville. I don’t believe you, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk [that way].”

Princess led Walker to the van where Mendenhall and Deppe were handcuffed together. He said he’ll never forget what Princess told him next.

“He’s got enough explosives in there to blow that whole school up,” he said Princess told him. “If it goes off, it’s gone. He’s planned this for a long time and it’ll be gone.”

Princess was turned over to dispatcher Davison, who asked for clarification.

“My dad went in the school to take it over and a bomb's going to go off and it's going to kill a whole lot of people,” Princess repeated.

Davison immediately began calling everyone she could, but it was slow going. Sheriff Deb Wolfsley was out of town. The town marshal was out of town. Hartley was returning from a trip to Utah.

Finally, Davison reached the Uinta County sheriff in Kemmerer, but she still had trouble getting anyone to believe it was a real hostage situation and not a drill.

“This is Kathy and we need everybody headed to Cokeville that we can get because there's an incident at the school,” Davison told dispatch in Kemmerer.

A bomb squad and SWAT team was mobilized from Jackson. Any vehicle with a siren was soon racing toward the scene where every school-age kid in Cokeville — kindergarten to sixth grade — was being held at gunpoint.

“I still get tears when I think of it. Think of how close we came to losing a whole generation,” Walker added.

He had three kids of his own in that school.

Hostages Rounded Up

Meanwhile, everyone in Cokeville Elementary was ushered into Mrs. Mitchell's first grade classroom. Some 136 schoolkids plus 18 adults were crammed into a 27-by-27-foot room.

It was hot and gas was leaking from one of the bomb’s plastic jugs. Kids were getting sick, so teachers got David Young to allow them to open some windows. Bomb experts say had they remained shut, the explosion would have been much more violent.

“If they had been closed, it would have taken the whole front of this building off,” Haskell assured.

Young had several rifles with him propped up against the blackboard. They were to be used on the teachers, he said. He also had a .22 pistol for the kids, if necessary — they would be less likely to be killed by the smaller caliber weapon — and a .45 Colt revolver in his other hand.

Young handed out leaflets explaining his ideology but it was all gibberish to the kids and adults. One thing that was clear: Young was a man to be feared.

“The kids were afraid. They realized much quicker than I did that this was dangerous,” said fourth grade teacher Kliss Sparks. “What he had in his mind was that when he exploded the bomb that he had built, everyone would be killed, and he and all these children would be transported to an island somewhere.”

Tina Cook was a secretary at Cokeville Elementary that day. She’ll never forget the look in David Young’s eyes.

“It was like looking into emptiness. I've never seen anything like it before or since,” she said. “It was like, you looked into his eyes and there was nobody there. There was just this big, empty, hollow look.”

A ransom of $2 million per kid was demanded. Young proclaimed over and over his intention was to never hurt the children. He needed them in his new world, in a life after where he would be their leader.

He didn’t want to shoot them. He only wanted to blow them all up, Hartley was convinced.

“This man had been planning this since 1978. He is absolutely, 100% positive in reincarnation. I mean this guy is going out,” Hartley said. “This is what he's been built for and the whole world is a stage. Everybody else, you and I, are just in his little theater.”

For more than two hours the kids prayed, they sang, they colored. David became more and more agitated, sweating profusely. It was later learned he was diabetic and may have been having a reaction. Doris and the teachers tried to keep the kids calm.

Tense Inside, Tense Outside

Outside the school was even more on edge.

Everyone in this part of the country has guns. When parents and grandparents heard their children were being held captive inside the elementary school, an armed militia soon gathered around the perimeter.

“I don’t think there was one father out there that didn’t have a gun because that guy wasn’t coming out of there alive,” said Cynthia Triplett, who was visiting the school for a job interview when she was taken hostage.

It was all emergency personnel could do to convince those armed locals to not storm the school.

He has a “dead man’s” bomb, Walker explained to the mob after talking with Princess. You kill him and the whole school blows.

“We had one person come down and he had his ought-six in his truck. He said, ‘My kid’s in there and I’m going to go get him,’” Walker remembered. He eventually stood him down.

Several buses and six ambulances waited on-scene. Cokeville has only one medical transport in its barn, but the others were in town for the training scenario. It ended up being a godsend.

Helicopters hovered overhead. It was the media. Somehow, they had been tipped off.

“As soon as this happened the media just swarmed in Cokeville. They caused us a lot of problems. They overwhelmed us,” Davison said.

Hartley agreed.

“The sheriff was just getting hounded by the media. You cannot even imagine the pressure to stay ahead of the media. That was an eye-opener to me,” Hartley said. “The media has such a network. It's far superior to anything law enforcement could even think of. They could have guys in Grinnell, Iowa, interviewing the parents before we even know who the parents are. I mean, it's phenomenal.”

As negotiations dragged on, Princess remained at town hall where she shared what information she could between bouts of sobbing.

“They were asking me questions about what his thoughts were and everything. I’m like, ‘I don’t know. He’s a crazy lunatic. He has lost his ever-loving mind. You’re going to have to take him out,’” Princess said she told officials. “I mean, he was the dad that raised me, but at this point, you gotta save the other people.”

The Bomb Goes Off

Young had wheeled his makeshift bomb to the center of the classroom on an upright shopping cart. The bottom of the cart held powders — aluminum powder and flour. Inside was also gunpowder, links of chain and plenty of ammunition for shrapnel projectiles.

It was a type of flash bomb designed to throw fine powders in the air. Once airborne, the powders would be ignited by the gas bottle, which was set to blow using one of several blasting caps.

If detonated correctly, Young’s bomb had the power to take out a whole school wing, as Haskell stated. But a few things went wrong. Or incredibly right.

“There's several things that kept this from going what we call ‘high order,’” Hartley explained. First, “to function properly, the cans beneath that gasoline have to be dry. The powder has to be dry for it to go out in a dust cloud. The milk bottle that they used had developed a leak for some reason. Nobody knows why. It had dripped gasoline down inside these powder cans. So, when ignited it blew out mud. Just a flammable, gas-soaked mud instead of this dust which kept that explosion from blowing up.”

Also, more than one blasting cap failed to trigger. When studied later, bomb technicians noted wires on more than one blasting cap had been severed. No one knows how or why.

After about two and a half hours into the standoff, David Young wrapped a shoelace lanyard around Doris’ wrist while he went to use the bathroom. The shoelace was attached to a clothespin that kept the positive and negative terminals of a 6-volt lantern battery from closing the circuit and causing ignition.

Young wasn’t gone a minute before an accidental detonation of the explosive happened.

“She had that shoestring on her hand,” Jean Mitchell recalled. “I put my hands up to my head and I said, ‘I’ve got a headache.’ She says, ‘Me, too.’ And she put her hands up to her head. And that was the end of it.”

Intense heat, thick black smoke, all hell broke loose. Witnesses say Doris was not killed instantly. She stumbled around the room on fire and begged for help.

In the chaos, David returned to the room and took a shot at a music teacher, John Miller, who was trying to remove desks from a barricade blocking the door. Had Young shot him with the .45, Miller might not be alive today. Instead, Miller was hit in the back with a .22 slug and fully recovered from the gunshot wound.

Next, Young took a shot at his wife engulfed in flames and missed. He tried again, and a shot to the head put her out of her misery. Young then retreated to the bathroom, placed the .45 under his chin and shot himself dead.

First Responders, Parents And Heroes

Glenna Walker was one of the first EMTs on the scene when the bomb went off. Like almost everyone there, she had kids in that classroom — three.

“Children started flying out those windows and running. They cleared the fences in one leap,” Walker said. The ones that recognized her were screaming, “Mrs. Walker, help me! Mrs. Walker, I'm on fire!”

She grabbed one boy and tried to console him.

“No, I have to get to my grandmother. He's going to come after us,” the boy said as he wriggled free.

“When the bomb went off, the sheriff and I ran around the side of the building and we could see these little kids coming out the windows,” Sparks said. “The firemen were throwing them out the windows, and just as soon as they hit the ground they were running, and they had black faces.

“The kids were out of that building in about 45 seconds. The little kids were just running and we couldn't figure out why when they hit the ground they kept running. But David Young told them that if they got out there were people waiting to shoot them. A lot of them we didn't catch. They ran all the way home because that’s the only place they felt safe.”

As first responders flocked toward the building, kids of all ages and sizes scrambled out the windows. Shots could be heard inside the building: "Pop, pop, pop.”

No one knew it at the time, but the intense heat of the fire was setting off all the ammunition the Youngs had brought with them. Later, investigators found the ceiling and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Not a single round struck any of the children.

When Walker arrived, he said kids were stacked two- and three-deep out the windows.

“My children saw me and I never even recognized them. My two girls. I thought, ‘What did they wear to school this morning? How can I recognize them?’” Walker remembered. “Every one of them came out with their little soot-covered faces, all you could see was eyes and panic.”

Third grader Jamie Buckley King remembers being in shock at first. She made no attempt to get to a window and out of the smoke-filled room. She initially thought Young had succeeded and she was in the next world already.

“Someone grabbed me by the back of my shirt and threw me. And the next thing I knew I was head first out the window in the front of the school. I remember thinking, ‘I'm not dead,’” King said.

She ran across the street into her father’s arms.

“The first thing I said was, ‘Dad, I'm so sorry but my shoes are in the room. Do you need me to go back and get them?’ Because we didn't have money, and so my first thought when I went to my dad was, ‘Oh, I'm going to be in trouble.’ Because I didn't have my shoes on. I had taken them off.

“My dad loved me. He just gave me a huge hug,” King continued. “But I remember going ‘ouch!’ I was severely burned on my right arm from around my thumb clear up almost to my elbow.”

EMTs triaged whomever they could catch. The worst burned went straight into waiting ambulances. Others were laid down on neighboring lawns and kept cool with hoses. School buses transported the minimally injured to area hospitals.

Miracle? Angels?

At least 10 kids would later report seeing angels that helped them through the ordeal.

Glenna and Kevin Walker’s son Travis told his parents he had a very strong feeling he needed to be near the windows just before the bomb went off. A voice told him, he said.

His two sisters were more definitive.

“We had a woman who stood by us,” they told their parents. “She wore little white slippers and we just knew she loved us.”

Both girls described their grandmother, Glenna’s mom, to a T. They had never met her. They had never seen a photograph of her in a family album. She died when Glenna was 15.

“I just remember her being in white. A little bit above the ground, just kind of there. She was white. Just brilliant white,” said Rachel Walker, who was in third grade at the time.

Rachel also saw other angels surrounding the bomb. But the one who ended up being her grandma Ruth was the one who somehow looked the most familiar to her.

“She seemed very comfortable to me. I felt like I knew her,” Rachel said.

Davison concurred about the angel sightings and the role they played in saving lives. Until she heard kids talking about the angels advising they stay near the windows, she could not understand why so many were spared by being furthest from the blast.

“I don't doubt for a minute that happened. Because a lot of kids seen the angels,” Davison said. “I think it's because those angels were pushing them. That's what the kids said, ‘The angels told us.’

“We didn't lose one child. We didn't lose one teacher. We didn't lose anybody except the perpetrator who killed his wife and himself. There was a lot of intervention,” Davison added.

Hardened Cop Softens

But the biggest convert of all was the man least likely to get all touchy-feely about angels and God’s providence. Lead investigator Ron Hartley was a no-nonsense hardened cop who didn’t believe anything he couldn’t touch or see.

Ron and Claudia had four kids in school that day, none more vulnerable than Nathan, their 6-year-old. Soon after the incident, Nathan began having terrible nightmares combined with a spiking fever. Fearing a post-traumatic disorder of some kind, Claudia took him to see a psychiatrist.

Nathan told the mental health examiner he saw and heard angels. When Claudia relayed this over the phone to Ron at work, he blew his top.

“I just come unglued. I was just really mad because I hated anybody that has to do with mental evaluation of people and stuff like that. I'm a redneck,” Hartley said.

“In law enforcement I've had cases where the shrink, the councilors and the doctors said there's nothing wrong with this young girl, and 30 days later I get a call [saying] she'd been sexually abused to where she has to have a hysterectomy,” he said. “And the girl is 12 years old. So, I just had real issues with shrinks.”

Hartley immediately raced home from work.

“I was livid,” he remembered.

When he got home, he sat his son down and began an interrogation, “just like I would any criminal.”

“I was going to show him that he was absolutely wrong,” Hartley shared. “I says, ‘OK, Nathan. What did you see?’

“Well, I had this angel come and she stood right by me,” Nathan answered.

“Who was she?” Hartley pressed his son.

“I don't know her name. I think it might have been Grandma Meister.”

“Aha,” thought Hartley. Gotcha! Grandma Meister was still alive in a nursing home at the time. It was highly unlikely she would be performing double-duty as an angel if she were still among the living.

Hartley grabbed his family’s Book of Remembrance, an LDS scrapbook of the departed. He flipped to the page where Grandma Meister was pictured seated next to Ron’s own mother.

“That’s her,” Nathan quickly said.

“This one here?” Ron clarified, pointing to the still-living Grandma Meister.

“No, the other one,” Nathan answered.

Hartley was stunned. Nathan had met Grandma Elliot only once when he was a year old before she passed away. He never saw a picture of her before.

“When he picked her picture out, that's when I knew. He actually picks the right grandma [out of the] two of them. The one that he'd never seen,” Hartley said.

Nathan went on to describe the scene where his own personal angel, Grandma Elliot, advised him to get closer to the windows. He also saw other angels.

Everybody had angels, Nathan said, even David and Doris Young, although David’s left him just before the bomb went off.

The bomb had blown straight up instead of out. It was supposed to go off like a grain explosion, radiating out 360 degrees. But it went off like a fire bomb and straight into the ceiling as if some force directed its energy in that direction.

Nathan never again talked about what he saw. His father says he struggles terribly with the memory to this day. But Hartley no longer questions his son’s testimony. There were angels in that room.

“There's no doubt in my mind,” he said.

Triplett, the teacher who was at the school for a job interview, can't swear to it, but she may have been comforted by Nathan. As she prayed for a mercifully quick ending to her own life, she heard a boy’s small voice say, “Everything’s going to be OK.”

Healing In The Aftermath

When it was mostly over, Walker returned to town hall where Princess was still there, waiting to hear.

“You’re the only one that will talk to me. Is my mom and dad dead?” the 19-year-old asked him.

“They’re not coming back. That’s all I can tell you,” Walker answered before turning and walking away. “And I feel sorry for that. I should have consoled that gal right then. Because I actually feel that without her running and helping, there could have been somebody killed other than the two that were. I’ve had that guilt for a long time.”

It was devastating for the 19-year-old.

“I was angry. How could they do this to me? How could they leave me like this?” Princess admitted. For more than two decades she couldn’t talk to anyone about it. “People wanted answers and I didn’t have answers. I still don’t have answers.”

The FBI kept tabs on Princess for a few years until convinced she really did know nothing of the hideous plot. Princess married a high school sweetheart shortly after and disappeared from the public.

“I did not know what was going on until it was too late. I’ve run it over in my head over and over,” Princess finally recounted later in 2022 on the Slate podcast. “How could I have stopped it sooner? Why couldn’t I have shot him in that hall? Why couldn’t I have been that brave? I should have stopped him right there.”

After the movie “A Cokeville Miracle” came out in 2015, Princess began hearing from some of the kids, now adults. They reached out after seeing her portrayed in a more understandable light by the movie.

“I really understood her role in it. I really got to see the hero she was,” said Jenny Johnson, a student that day in May 1986.

The outpouring meant everything to the embattled young lady who watched her father torture a town’s people.

“I probably cried more than I’ve ever cried in my life when I heard these people reaching out to me, and to meet them for the first time was priceless. It was incredible,” Princess said.

For most all of the Cokeville residents who were part of the 1986 tragedy, the nightmares eventually subsided. Time would heal, life returned to some normalcy.

Still, little things like the smell of gasoline or the sound of fireworks trigger upsetting memories.

A madman tried but failed to shake the tightknit community’s bonds and beliefs. David Young is buried in an unmarked grave. Cokeville was raised from the ashes.

“He wanted a life after death. Which I’m sure he’s got his reward by now,” Kevin Walker said. “He’s living in it.”

Contact Jake Nichols at jake@cowboystatedaily.com

Jake Nichols can be reached at jake@cowboystatedaily.com.