Situated just outside the southwestern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park is the small town of Granby, Colorado. Founded in 1874 and named for Granby Hillyer, a transplanted Georgian who migrated to Colorado Territory to practice law, the village is surrounded by the beauty of majestic, snow-covered peaks reaching thousands of feet toward the sky.
Sitting near the headwaters of the Colorado River and astride the Amtrak railroad line that connects Chicago and San Francisco, the town’s population has never exceeded two thousand. But an event that occurred in early June 2004 brought worldwide attention, albeit unwanted, to the tiny settlement and its inhabitants.
So far, a glorious springtime had reigned throughout the Rocky Mountains, but the cool days were gradually giving way to the soothing warmth of the approaching summer.
The mountains along the horizon were losing their snow, and many of the nearby resort owners were gearing up for what they hoped would be a busy and successful golf season.
However, despite predictions that thousands of tourists would soon descend upon the town and its environs, some residents of Granby sensed that all was not well in their beloved hometown.
For one thing, there was the nearly three-year impasse between the Docheff family, who owned and operated Mountain Park Concrete Company, and fifty-two-year-old Marvin Heemeyer, who ran the local muffler shop about a half-mile down the road.
For the past few years, Cody Docheff’s ready-mix concrete outfit had grown so rapidly that he decided to build a much larger facility that would boost production by thousands of yards of concrete annually.
The site for the new operations was located adjacent to Heemeyer’s shop.
Before he could build his new facility, Docheff discovered that he would have to produce all types of reports to town officials in order to obtain his building permit.
One document after another was furnished, and just when it seemed that he was about to receive the town’s blessings, he learned that Heemeyer had vigorously objected to the plan and managed to block its approval.
For thirty months, the battle waged, until the project was finally given the green light.
Following his defeat with City Hall, Heemeyer made a trip to California and one day appeared back in Granby. Several days later, a used bulldozer showed up at his muffler shop with a “For Sale” sign on it.
The story was that Heemeyer had purchased the bulldozer at a West Coast auction sale and shipped it back home. Most folks believed that the old, beat-up machine was just another trinket for Heemeyer to tinker on in his spare time.
Soon after the arrival of the bulldozer, however, Heemeyer sold the muffler shop and both he and the bulldozer disappeared from sight, leaving his neighbors wondering if he had simply left town with the nearly half-million dollars that he received from the sale of his business.
They could not have been more wrong.
Few folks in Granby really missed Marvin Heemeyer when he vanished. The individual who purchased his muffler shop converted the building into The Trash Company, a refuse collection service.
What the townspeople did not know was that Heemeyer had leased one-half of his old building from the new owner, built a permanent wall between his space and the new facility, moved his bulldozer into his half of the building, and begun converting the vehicle into a formidable killing machine that he would soon unleash to make his final statement to the Docheff family and to selected city fathers and other citizens of Granby.
For six months, Heemeyer worked on his behemoth in the part of his former shop that he had rented. No one ever saw him during this time because he had stockpiled food, water, and other essentials in the building; furnished it with a bed, a television, and other necessities; and proceeded to live on the site.
He covered the bulldozer with half-inch steel plating and concrete, added bulletproof Plexiglas to the weapons ports through which he intended to fire upon selected victims, rigged closed-circuit TV cameras on the exterior of the vehicle that allowed him to “see” activities outside, and filled it with a variety of weapons, including—according to one source—a .50 caliber sniper rifle and two .223 caliber semiautomatic rifles.
It would be interesting to know if Heemeyer ever realized until he activated his diabolical plan that his monstrosity’s maximum speed would be less than five miles per hour.
At some point in time, Heemeyer arrived at the date upon which he would climb into the modified bulldozer, drive into the streets of Granby, and begin a brief reign of terror unimagined by anyone who lived in the quiet town.
Susie Docheff, Cody’s wife, later described Friday, June 4, as “a beautiful day,” clear and warm, with plenty of sunshine. In two days, some of the older residents would unfurl their American flags to honor D-Day—June 6, 1944—when the United States and its allies invaded France and instigated the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany’s five-year-old iron grip on the Continent.
No one really knows what kind of a day Heemeyer thought it was. He must have believed it was his own personal “D-Day” though, and a couple of hours past noon, he climbed into his improvised tank-bulldozer, cranked up the engine, and proceeded to drive through the wall of his rented building onto the parking lot of business neighbor Cody Docheff’s newly constructed concrete plant.
Docheff and two employees were working inside the small precast shop when Heemeyer leveled one of the walls, obliterating all of the equipment inside. Miraculously, no one was hurt. Hoping to head off more damage, Docheff then mounted a front-end loader as Heemeyer headed his vehicle toward the concrete complex’s main building.
“I tried poking the loader bucket into the dozer’s track into the motor, but I couldn’t bust the shroud,” Docheff later reported. Heemeyer, in the meantime, fired several shots from the .50 caliber sniper rifle, but each round ricocheted off the heavy steel of the front-end loader’s bucket.
After practically demolishing the entire main building, Heemeyer then turned his attention to several businesses whose owners had some connection to his longtime battle with city fathers over his resistance to the construction of Docheff’s concrete factory: Liberty Savings Bank, where a zoning commission member worked; the residence of the eighty-two-year-old widow of the late mayor who served Granby during the dispute; the Sky-Hi newspaper office, whose editor often voiced a critical view of Heemeyer’s opposition to the concrete plant; and Town Hall, where the village’s vital records were stored and the public library was housed in the basement.
Only minutes before the madman crashed through Town Hall, the librarian on duty had hustled several children to safety. Several other buildings were also destroyed, as well as parked automobiles, street signs, and utility poles.
But Heemeyer was not done. Observing thick, black smoke and foul-smelling fluid exuding from his bulldozer, he must have sensed that the vehicle was in its last throes. A few yards farther down the street, he attempted to explode several large propane tanks with rifle fire, but failed.
When he approached Gamble’s Hardware Store, owned by one of the town’s trustees, he smashed in one wall before his vehicle became hopelessly mired in the debris. Shortly afterwards, at around 4:30 p.m., a single shot was heard coming from the bulldozer. When authorities finally entered the vehicle, they found Heemeyer dead from a bullet to the head. The entire ordeal had lasted only a little more than two hours.
Local and state law enforcement officers from all over the region, assisted by members of the US Forest Service from nearby national forests, responded to the Granby nightmare. Hundreds of rounds of ammunition were fired, and thirteen buildings were completely or partially destroyed. Yet, other than Heemeyer, no one was killed, nor even seriously wounded.
The Docheff family alone lost two million dollars, while losses to the city totaled three million. Yet, neither the town nor its citizens gave up on their futures. Mayor Edward Wang expressed the sentiments that were in everyone’s heart when he stated, “We have very good people in this community. The most gratifying part is, there are a lot of people who are lining up to help us rebuild. This town isn’t going away. This is a setback. We’re going to rebuild. This is a tough town.”
When this tragedy occurred Candy Moulton, a regular contributor to Cowboy State Daily, and I were in Chicago representing Western Writers of America (WWA) at the annual meeting of the American Library Association.
When we learned that the town’s library and its contents were destroyed, we made a plea to our membership to contribute copies of their own books to assist in reestablishing the library as soon as possible.
Later in the summer Candy and WWA President Rita Cleary delivered a load of books to the library…so readers could once again find Western books on the shelves.
James Crutchfield can be reached at: tncrutch@aol.com
