Savage Saga of Radical Right Told in Trial

In the years since the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building shone a spotlight on the deep-rooted coils of anti-government activism in middle America, the stories have become many: standoffs in Montana, bombings in Washington state, bank robberies in the Midwest.

Few of the stories of the underground war with the ultra-right have been as calamitous as that of the Kehoe brothers, two home-schooled boys from rural Washington who talked of building a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest and, authorities say, wound up on a nationwide rampage of murder, theft, bombings and police gunfights.

Their drama, unfolding in one of the government’s most important anti-government racketeering trials in recent years, culminated last week on two sides of a federal courtroom here. Chevie Kehoe, 26, stood accused of leading a murderous campaign to create his dream of an Aryan Peoples Republic. Cheyne Kehoe, the 22-year-old brother who followed him on a 14-state odyssey of gun shows and shootouts before turning his brother in, gave testimony that could send him to his execution.

This, Cheyne Kehoe’s lawyer told a state court jury in an earlier trial, “is truly a modern-day tragic story of Cain and Abel.”

It is also one of the government’s highest-profile attempts to bring the weight of federal anti-racketeering statutes against increasingly vocal movements advocating the causes of white separatism and anti-government militancy.

Chevie Kehoe, accused of involvement in five murders, two robberies, a kidnapping, a city hall bombing and two shootouts with police, is tied to more acts of domestic terrorism than any other right-wing extremist in the United States in the last decade, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the ultra-right.

The case has drawn national attention, in part, because of the Kehoe family’s connection to the Aryan Nations in Idaho and the Elohim City compound in Muldrow, Okla., where the Kehoes are said to have made contact with members of the Aryan Republican Army, responsible for a string of recent bank robberies. Kehoe’s father, Kirby, who pleaded guilty to racketeering charges before trial, supplied at least one of the guns used in the ARA robberies, federal sources said.

Defense lawyers, who will commence their case this week, appear poised to throw much of the blame on Cheyne Kehoe, who they suggested could be pointing blame at his brother to remove suspicion from himself. Moreover, they have scoffed at government attempts to paint the Kehoe family--a network of drifters who wandered the West in motor homes, buying and selling guns, fixing cars, building barns and shoveling snow--as serious threats.

Indeed, by the time it had rested its case last week before a jury of nine blacks and three whites, the government had sketched the Kehoes more as white-trash thugs than Aryan warriors. The Aryan Peoples Republic appeared as a few crude insignias on written communiques and a bomb that exploded harmlessly in the night.

“If these boys are charged with trying to overthrow the government,” defense lawyer Cathleen Compton told the court, “we’re all safe.”

Mother Tells Jury a Chilling Story

Surely the number of mothers who have offered damning testimony against their sons in capital cases must be few. Yet Gloria Kehoe sat on a witness stand last week and told jurors a chilling story about the son, the eldest of eight, with whom she had always been closest.

Breaking down in tears and occasionally locking eyes with Kehoe and declaring, “I love you, Chevie,” Gloria Kehoe related the details of the most serious offense with which Kehoe and co-defendant Daniel Lee are charged: barging into the home of Arkansas gun dealer Bill Mueller, handcuffing him, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter, shocking them with a stun gun, taping plastic bags over their heads and throwing their bodies in a nearby bayou.

Chevie, she said, had calmly related the details of the murders to her when she wanted to know how he acquired the $37,000 worth of guns and ammunition stolen from the Muellers, longtime family friends of the Kehoes.

“It’s got to be told, Chevie,” she asserted. “There’s wrong, and there’s right. I can’t live with it anymore. It’s hell.”

Cheyne told a similar story. The younger brother is facing a 24-year sentence in Ohio for a shootout with police--sparked when Chevie feared state troopers who pulled them over knew about the Mueller murders--but was not involved in any of the killings in which he implicated his brother, authorities say.

Cheyne told jurors his brother admitted to him not only his role in the Mueller killings, but also his involvement in the murders in Washington and Idaho of two former associates, Jeremy Scott, 23, and Jon Cox, 25. The five deaths form the center of the government’s seven-count racketeering, conspiracy and murder indictment.

Plan for Aryan Peoples Republic

Federal prosecutors produced evidence that Chevie Kehoe hoped to build an Aryan Peoples Republic in the Pacific Northwest, a republic to be established through the murders of judges and local officials, bombings and armored car robberies--none of which, save for a 1996 bomb that exploded without injury at City Hall in Spokane, Wash., was ever carried out.

Kehoe himself took at least three wives in a polygamous attempt to produce “good Aryan babies” for the new republic, especially after learning that his first wife might have Native American ancestry, witnesses testified.

Kehoe, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Dan Stripling, had long regarded as a hero Robert Mathews, an anti-government militant who founded a group in the 1980s known as the Order, members of which were convicted in the murder of a Jewish Denver talk show host. Mathews burned to death when authorities torched the rural Washington house in which he was holed up.

The thing Kehoe most admired about Mathews, witnesses said, was the way he died: in an inferno, standing up. “I will not serve the system. Freedom, my friend, freedom. Think ‘White Wolf.’ Think ‘Brave Heart,’ ” he wrote to co-defendant Lee after their arrest. “Victory for those who are willing to pay the price.”

Chevie Kehoe got so named because his father, a wandering auto mechanic who never forgave the government for exposing him to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, liked Chevrolets best of all.

The family saga is in many ways the ultimate American road trip. They buy a travel trailer and drive from Florida to Colville, Wash., park it out by a river, have some kids, move to Arkansas for a while. Sell the trailer, buy a truck. Drive around the Midwest and make some money putting up pole barns, stop in at the Elohim City compound. Fix up the truck and move to Montana.

Cheyne and Chevie were both pulled out of junior high and home schooled, living in a cabin without electricity. Both boys married early. Chevie and his wife lived in a school bus and a motel room before Chevie stole a travel trailer in Arkansas and hauled it back to Washington.

Both boys often wandered the West looking for work: construction jobs, a few months at a sawmill. They were good at what Kirby Kehoe had always been good at: buying guns, cleaning them up, and selling them on the gun show circuit at a profit.

Chevie Kehoe would often drive over to the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho, where he was a devotee of the Rev. Richard Butler’s sermons on white supremacy, and both boys spent time at Elohim City.

It was after a stay there that Chevie came back to the The Shadows motel in Spokane, where he did something that struck former motel manager Jeff Brown as odd.

On the morning of April 19, 1995, Kehoe woke him up in the early morning hours, banging on his door, and insisting that he turn on CNN, Brown recalled in an interview.

“Ten minutes later, the news is breaking there was a bomb going off in Oklahoma City,” Brown said. “And he says, ‘It’s about time.’ ”

Brown remembers exclaiming, “It’s gotta be a car bomb!” Kehoe, he remembers, replied: “It’s gotta be a truck bomb.”

“I look back on it,” Brown said, “and he obviously knew about it beforehand.”

Federal authorities have not linked Kehoe to the Oklahoma City bombing or its perpetrator, Timothy J. McVeigh, but they have not ruled out the possibility that the two of them could have met at Elohim City.

That same year, Chevie and his father allegedly burglarized the Mueller home in Arkansas. The elder Kehoe defended it later to his wife: Mueller had sold a used water pump to an elderly couple at the price of a new one. Besides, he said, Mueller’s wife was part Cherokee.

Later, Mueller accused Kehoe of the crime, and threatened to kill Kirby Kehoe if Mueller could prove it. That infuriated Chevie, several witnesses said, and led to the day when they allegedly burst into the Mueller home disguised as federal agents and murdered the family.

But Chevie was up to no good at home, too, said Brown, who testified that Kehoe cooked up homemade bombs on his stove at the motel, exploding them in phone books.

Husband Murdered, Second Wife Taken

Prosecutors say Kehoe recruited a fellow white supremacist who lived in the Idaho backwoods, Faron Lovelace, to murder former Skinhead Jeremy Scott. Kehoe was in love with Scott’s wife, and took her as his second wife after helping Lovelace bury the body, authorities say.

Cox, originally from Sacramento, was allegedly murdered because he began writing letters to a girlfriend, bragging about Kehoe’s plans to hold up armored cars and set off a bomb at City Hall. His body was never found, but several of Cox’s drawings and photo albums were found in the possession of Lee, a former skinhead who went by the nickname “Cyclops” after losing an eye in a bar fight. Chevie Kehoe had, according to prosecutors, given him $1,000 and some guns for helping kill the Muellers.

When Kehoe started talking about killing his own parents, even Brown thought he was going too far, and eventually, Brown agreed to testify against his former friend, known to his friends as Bud. The two met in the courthouse hallway not long ago.

“The first thing he says, ‘Hey, what’s up, man?’ And I’m like, ‘Hey, price of freedom, dude.’ ” Brown half laughed. “Bud doesn’t realize he’s heading for the big sleep. You got two appeals, Buddy. You’re gonna die before Timothy McVeigh.”

Two Families, Kids and a Dozen Guns

The last chapter of the Kehoe saga, the one that wound up putting Cheyne Kehoe on the witness stand to seal his brother’s fate, came after they set out looking for construction work.

“I didn’t have a job, snow was 5, 6, 7 feet deep. Cramped quarters. I was--my dad was, as you can guess, a little controlling. I was ready to get out from under that,” Cheyne testified. “A way to move on, travel. Change of scenery.”

And so the American highway opened up for the Kehoe brothers one last time. The two families, kids in tow, took off with a dozen or so guns. They were driving down an Ohio highway when a state trooper pulled them over for expired plates. Chevie got out of the car, and as Cheyne waited nervously in the passenger seat, bolted toward the car and tried to drive off, a trooper hanging onto him.

Cheyne unloaded several rounds before taking off on foot. Chevie roared off and a few miles away, emptied several rounds into the windshield of a local police officer. The two young men regrouped in Utah, where they found work splitting fence posts, but Cheyne was growing more fearful of his brother. Not only had Chevie talked of a string of murders with no apparent remorse, Cheyne said, but now he was talking about killing their parents and splitting Kirby’s valuable arsenal.

In the middle of one night, Cheyne and his wife and child stole away. The next day, Cheyne turned himself in, and told authorities where they would find Chevie. As for his brother, Cheyne told an NBC interviewer that he wouldn’t mind seeing his brother die, figures he has it coming, in fact. “He crossed the line somewhere in his life,” he said. “And love can’t even follow a person that far.”