It’s June 4, 2004, and the streets of Granby, Colorado, are rumbling. As one of just under 1,800 residents of this sleepy service town nestled within the Rocky Mountains, you aren’t used to hearing much beyond the sounds of chirping birds, rushing streams, and the steady whir of car engines as their drivers refuel or stop for a snack on their way to more interesting places. But today, you peek outside to witness something akin to the footage you’ve seen on TV of Fallujah. People run for their lives. The city hall, the local newspaper office, and the bank have been reduced to rubble. Gunshots echo across the street, and then you see it. A hulking tank lumbers down the road, rolling over trees, flattening cars, and finally bursting through the walls of the Gambles general store. Its tread becomes stuck in the building’s basement. The beast roars with an impotent fury. Authorities surround the machine. The engine is failing. With only a long prison sentence to look forward to, the captain of this death machine, Marvin Heemeyer—the owner of a local muffler shop—whips out a .357-caliber handgun and shoots himself in the head. But had Marv known how he’d be remembered 20 years later, perhaps he wouldn’t have.

If you spend much time on the internet, it’s only a matter of time before you come across the word “Killdozer,” the name affectionately given to Marv’s steel-plated Komatsu D355A bulldozer. Despite the name’s menace, those who invoke it tend to do so more with awe or outright admiration than scorn. You don’t have to look far to find posts describing Heemeyer’s vehicle not as a tool of senseless violence, but one of righteous fury. Accounts of his rampage paint him as “a reasonable man driven to do unreasonable things” (a quote lifted from a note Heemeyer left behind after his death). Perhaps the most widely circulated post in the Killdozer mythos, which was shared more than 45,000 times on Facebook, celebrates Heemeyer as “the last Great American Folk Hero” and “a man driven to the brink who chose to fight back against an indifferent system.” 

The web is littered with Killdozer merchandise. You can buy any number of T-shirts and hats, a Killdozer patch for your tactical gear, and a set of Killdozer coasters for your dining room. You can slap a bumper sticker on the back of your F-150 reading “Honk if the News Makes You Want to Modify a Bulldozer.” Etsy has countless mini replica Killdozer toys to choose from, and you can also find a Marv Heemeyer action figure. (They’re the perfect companion for your Oklahoma City Bombing Lego playset!) But perhaps the most ubiquitous pieces of Killdozer kitsch are iterations of the famous Gadsden flag emblazoned with Heemeyer’s vehicle. While the classic version displays the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me,” Killdozer versions modify it to a more ominous sentiment: “Tread on Those Who Tread on You” or simply “Tread on Them.” There’s even a metal wall decoration that reads “Live, Laugh, Tread.”

Right-wing admiration of Heemeyer is of a piece with the similarly meme-laden reverence for the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who died in prison last year at the age of 81. Invocations of the Killdozer are popular among terrorist and vigilante groups on the far right (though even some left-wingers seem to admire him as well). Megan Squire, a data analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Tampa Bay Times that it’s common for chapters of the far-right Proud Boys street gang around the country to make posts on Telegram celebrating “Killdozer Day” each June. A similar group, the Boogaloo Bois, frequently invokes the phrase “I became unreasonable” in its messages, and one adherent even scrawled those words in blood across a car after murdering a sheriff’s deputy in Oakland. It has also been speculated that the Boogaloo Bois’ uniform—the Hawaiian shirt—is a reference to Heemeyer, who wore one on the day he carried out his rampage.

Heemeyer’s story, at least as it’s frequently told in the public imagination, is one of a humble yeoman pushed to the edge by forces more powerful than him. As Sky-Hi News publisher Patrick Brower, who covered Heemeyer extensively and had his paper’s building destroyed in his rampage, would later tell ABC7 Denver, “They think of [Marv] as the itty bitty guy who fought back at the government that got in their way.” But an examination of the years-long saga that led Heemeyer to construct a death machine to terrorize Granby reveals something much different. 

One of the most viral “Killdozer Day” posts states that “His business and livelihood were in ruin. Rather than lie down and die, Marvin chose to fight back.” In reality, at the time of his rampage, 9WTK News estimated that Heemeyer left behind an estate worth nearly $1 million, including a home worth nearly $400,000 and a business and tools worth more than $500,000. With that number in mind, it’s a lot harder to view him as an Ordinary Guy fighting back against The Man after being pushed around too long. Rather, he was a wealthy man seething with rage that he couldn’t become wealthier at the expense of others.

The series of events leading up to Heemeyer’s rampage began in 1992, when he arrived in Granby from nearby Grand Lake, Colorado, seeking a business opportunity. A talented welder, he was renowned for his work with mufflers—“Marv the Muffler Man” was able to change one in 20 minutes, according to one friend quoted by the Associated Press. In his book Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage, Patrick Brower wrote: 

 

It didn’t take him long, working at shops in North Denver and Boulder, to see that he was better than his bosses at the mechanics and the business side of muffler repair. He opened his own shop with help from a partner and before long he had two more shops in Boulder and Denver. Through the ups and downs of the economy he had managed to buy land for the shops at low prices and sell them high. He made money on real estate and he still owned a shop that was making good money. He’d keep it, hire a manager, and move to the mountains to enjoy the good life.

In the aftermath of the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, foreclosed properties were being sold for rock-bottom prices. It was in this environment that Heemeyer saw his next opportunity. He learned of a distressed two-acre plot of land in Granby that was coming up for auction. He’d learned that multiple appraisers had valued the land at over $100,000, well over the starting bid of $20,000. And he knew that his snowmobiling buddy and former auto-repair partner, John Kleiner, had been seeking to move his own business from Boulder into the mountains. According to Brower, “Heemeyer hoped he could buy it for a song, lease it or sell it back to Kleiner on favorable terms and add to his already fairly comfortable income stream.”

After bidding against two other men, Heemeyer wound up with the winning bid, getting the plot for $42,000, much less than the $66,000 that he and Kleiner had been willing to pay. Little did Heemeyer know, one of the other bidders was the property’s former owner—Cody Docheff, who owned a concrete plant right next door. The other was the former mayor of Granby, Gus Harris. As Heemeyer recalls in a series of tapes he left behind as a manifesto, Docheff and Harris approached him after the auction to give him a “tongue lashing for about 10 minutes about who I thought I was and what I was going to do with the property. ” Heemeyer also says he offered to sell the property to the men for $66,000, but they couldn’t reach a deal. Heemeyer would later say it was because they offered him $50,000, less than the amount he’d get if he sold the land to Kleiner. Heemeyer would later go on to describe Docheff as “about the rudest, most arrogant person… a fucking asshole.” For their part, Docheff says he doesn’t remember having any conversation with Heemeyer, while Harris only recalls saying, “Well, it looks like you got yourself a piece of property.” Another local businessman who was present says he did not remember any verbal confrontation between the men.

At any rate, Heemeyer was now the owner of what seemed like a “perfect” piece of land. Or at least that’s what he thought. He soon realized that the plot didn’t have a legal water or sewer service—instead, Brower says in the documentary Tread, “it had nothing more than just a concrete mixer tank that was holding the sewage.” Heemeyer had been told by Bud Wilson, the manager of the Granby Sanitation District, that he could be hooked onto the local sewer system. But when he arrived at a board meeting to iron out the details, he learned that he’d be responsible for installing a pump station and 100 feet of service line in order to get connected to the sewer main. According to Brower’s book, Heemeyer was told by the board’s vice president, Ron Thompson (the son of another former mayor, Dick Thompson, and part of another wealthy land-owning family), that it would cost him “a pretty penny,” both to set up and maintain. They also told Heemeyer that he could instead install a septic tank for a considerably smaller amount of money. 

Marv Heemeyer rejected both of these offers. He said he’d be willing to pay to get annexed into the system and pay property taxes, but that “you’ve got to hook me up.” The board told Heemeyer that the town couldn’t just hook him up for free. “This little district isn’t made of money. We can’t let the other people, people here before you, pay for you,” Thompson said. “We'll pay to annex. You have to pay to hook on. Those are the rules. Development has to pay its own way, otherwise we’d go broke.” Heemeyer was irate about this, saying it was “not worth it,” as the hookup might end up costing more than $70,000, more than he’d paid for the property itself. “You should want to hook me on,” Heemeyer argued. “I'll bring business and fees to you. I’d become part of the community with a nice little business down there. Even more. I could expand. I mean, what do you do then?” After Thompson refused again, Heemeyer stood up and exclaimed, “You can’t expect to grow if this is your policy. It’s extortion by government fiat. I don’t need you. You need me.”

Illustration by Nick Sirotich

This interaction gives you a very clear look into Heemeyer’s beliefs about his rights and obligations as a businessman and, by extension, the beliefs of his defenders. Heemeyer would come to believe that he was being set up by Thompson, who owned the excavation company that likely would be responsible for installing the line. That could well have been the case. And it’s definitely fair to wonder if someone like Thompson, who stood to privately benefit from sanitation contracts, should have had a place on a board that decides what sanitation projects need to be paid for. But it’s clear that Heemeyer’s objection was not so much about who’d benefit from his payment but about the fact that he had to pay for the sewage line at all. The real question here was about whether Heemeyer’s business should have been subsidized by the town, or whether he should have had to bear the costs to get his business up and running himself. His argument for the former is quite familiar if you’ve listened to right-wing economists for any length of time: It’s essentially a case for trickle-down economics on a local scale. Instead of a huge tax break from the Reagan or Bush administration, Heemeyer wanted a free sewer line from the government of Granby. But the logic is the same in both cases. He expected the public to assume the risk on his behalf, while he would most immediately profit—privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, in other words. By draining the government coffers to pay for his sewer hookup, Heemeyer made the case that it would pay off in the long term for the town as a whole. We can’t know for sure if he was right, although Thompson made a compelling argument that if this same logic was extended to every business that wanted to establish itself on unincorporated land, the town would quickly go broke. In Heemeyer’s myopic and paranoid worldview, this requirement that he play by the same rules as everyone else came to be interpreted not as the cost of doing business within a larger society but as a conspiracy against him on the part of the town’s grandees.

Even after his outburst, Heemeyer’s property was unanimously granted the right to connect to the sewage system by Granby’s sanitation board. His hopes of selling the property to Kleiner fell through due to oil spills, which led to an EPA audit and some expensive cleanup. With no buyer left for his land, Heemeyer decided to open his own shop, Mountain View Muffler, on the plot. He maintained steady business, but his resentments continued to build. 

In 1997, Joe Docheff (the son of the property’s previous owner, Cody) approached Marv hoping the family could buy his property and construct a concrete plant there. He initially agreed to Marv’s offer to sell him the land for $250,000, but after checking with his family, he returned to find that Marv had increased the price to $375,000, then $450,000 after consulting with appraisers. As the Docheffs presented a plan to the Granby Planning Commission, Marv had initially agreed to swap his property for some prime land elsewhere. But once again, he kept asking for more—including a $150,000 building paid for by the Docheffs. When the Docheffs refused, Heemeyer began a door-to-door campaign attempting to rally the town against the proposed concrete plant. He wrote a lengthy letter to the editor in which he railed against the plant’s supposed environmental impacts (something he was curiously not worried about when it came to his own lack of a proper sewage system). 

In an effort to get Heemeyer to drop the issue, the Docheffs offered to do him a solid. With that old cement tank long filled up with toilet and septic waste, John Docheff called Heemeyer, offering him an easement to be connected to his property’s pipes and onto the local sewer main free of charge, if he’d only stop his campaign against the concrete plant. As Brower writes, “Heemeyer hung up without saying a word. A registered letter was sent to Heemeyer’s address in which the offer was repeated. Heemeyer refused to pick it up. Heemeyer never said a word again about the offer made by the Docheffs.” Heemeyer, in his abundant concern for the environment, would instead pump all his toilet waste into the Horn Ditch out back, which sent it pouring onto a neighbor’s property. He was later caught attempting to dig a ditch to illegally connect to another neighbor’s pipes, which were hooked up to the city system.

In 2001, as Heemeyer’s neighbors grew sick of dealing with his shit (both literally and figuratively), the town fined him $2,500 for contempt of the town code for failing to obtain the required sewer hookup—something he’d resisted for nearly a decade. After another year, he’d still not taken the offer. As Brower writes: 

[The board] had been giving him a chance to make it good, without angst. People in town had noticed, wondering why Heemeyer was being given such leeway. He’d been in clear violation for a full year and nothing had happened and many argued he had been in violation long before that. And now Heemeyer wasn’t even willing to take advantage of the leeway he had been given.

They told him that until he removed the concrete tank he’d been using and got a proper hookup to the sewer line, he’d be unable to operate his business. After initially agreeing to the terms, Heemeyer reneged, instead punching out an email with the subject line “Misguided Malice,” in which he denounced their efforts as a “form of terrorism”: 

I signed unjust and manipulative documents, as the lessor (sic) of two evils, to undeservedly appease what I believe to be a misguided, corrupt and unjustifiably malicious and vengeful group of people who have over the last 10 (TEN) years plus effectively, maliciously, willfully and perversely sought to impede my attempt to develop a property, earn an income and provide for my future.

As he walked out of the courtroom, Heemeyer’s attorney Ben McClelland said he recalled hearing him say, “I’m just gonna bulldozer this whole place to the ground.”

“God built me for this job. He rewarded me for 45-50 years with a lifestyle that I am so thankful for. And it’s unfortunate. The poor people in Granby. So many of them were so jealous of my lifestyle—that I could come and go as I pleased. Well, God blessed me in advance for the task that I am about to undertake." —marvin heemeyer

In 2002—in the midst of his legal battle—Marvin Heemeyer traveled to California and purchased a Komatsu D355A bulldozer for $16,000 at another auction. After having it shipped to Granby, Heemeyer put the dozer up for auction but struggled to find any takers. He soon eased the hulking machine back into his garage and found that it fit perfectly.  He believed that it was a sign from God. Shortly after the disastrous town meeting, he reclined in his hot tub and recorded these words to a cassette tape:

I’m trying to understand why this was happening to me. And, to do what I have to do—to make these people listen. A peace is coming over me that has only come over me a few times before in my life; where I know that what I will do is tough but it is the right thing and that it is above me. It wasn’t me. I am doing this because God wanted me to do it. And I didn’t understand it. I said “Why did you ask me to do this? Is that why I’ve never been married? So I didn’t have a family? Is that why I’ve always been successful? So that I would realize my reward before doing this task?” I don’t know. There are other things I can ask. Why had I not carried my cross earlier, and now God has prepared me to carry this cross? I believe so.

He shut down Mountain View Muffler in October 2002, putting almost all of his tools up for auction. He was able to sell much of his property, including the building itself, for $400,000 (nearly ten times what he’d paid for it). Within the day, the new owners got hooked up to the sewer main. 

Marvin Heemeyer would take the next year and change off work. He spent the winter snowmobiling through the mountains with a group of friends. When the weather warmed up, he headed back to Granby. The dozer remained off in a corner, covered in a polypropylene tarp. Heemeyer had leased back part of his property from its new owner—a trash company known as The Trash Company—and converted the steel shed into a miniature apartment, with a small windowless area blocked off from view with more tarps. The only thing the apartment lacked was a toilet and water. But that was no issue—Heemeyer just kept dumping everything into Horn Ditch. 

He’d set up security cameras outside to ensure nobody would enter unexpectedly. According to his tapes, Heemeyer “spent the whole summer of 2003 in that freaking building, lived there without a shower for as much as four days at a time working.” Under cover of darkness, he hauled supplies from the local Ace Hardware and drove up to Denver to procure massive slabs of steel. He constructed a homemade crane that he used for welding. He fortified the engine, cabin, and part of the tracks with layers of quick-dry concrete sandwiched between two sheets of half-inch thick steel. In some parts, the armor was more than a foot thick. He installed a ventilation system, air conditioners, and security cameras on the now-windowless machine’s exterior that he could view with two computer monitors on the dashboard. Some of the only vulnerabilities in the shell of the nearly 50-ton monstrosity were the three small ports he’d sliced out for his rifles.

On June 4, 2004—a drizzly Friday afternoon—Marvin Heemeyer clanked down the hood of his death machine and spent two hours smashing through thirteen different buildings. His first stop, naturally, was the Docheffs’ property next door, where his battering ram destroyed virtually everything but the concrete plant itself. Docheff tried to stop the machine by throwing objects between its treads, but it was no use. Heemeyer proceeded to rumble down Agate Avenue, wrecking his enemies’ businesses one by one: Liberty Savings Bank, Mountain Parks Electric Co., Maple Street Builders, Granby Town Hall, the Sky-Hi newspaper office, and Kopy Kat Graphics and Printing.

A common myth in the Killdozer community is that Marv limited his attacks only to those who’d wronged him. Even if this were true, it would hardly be justified. But it’s not. He attacked the office of a random woman who happened to sit on the zoning board. In an attempt to bulldoze the home of Mayor Dick Thompson, who by that time was already dead, he wound up instead attacking Thompson’s 82-year-old widow. He rammed into the city hall just moments after a group of children who were there for a story hour in its basement library had evacuated. While the kids narrowly escaped, countless town records and archives did not. Defenders point to the fact that nobody but Heemeyer died that day as evidence of his benevolence. But that fact is no thanks to him. People only knew to evacuate because of a reverse 911 call from the police department that was sent out shortly after news got out of a bulldozer on the loose. At one point, Heemeyer swerved into a propane storage yard and began firing dozens of rounds at the tanks, which were right next door to a senior center that had to be evacuated. He not only seemed determined for someone to die but determined to engulf the town in a ball of fire.

The dozer withstood hundreds of bullets from the police. With efforts to stop the monstrosity proving futile, Governor Bill Owens reportedly considered calling in Hellfire missiles or Javelin anti-tank missiles to take the bulldozer down but ultimately decided against it, as an airstrike would cause greater damage than Heemeyer was capable of. In the end, it was not military or police firepower that did the Killdozer in. As Brower writes, “Heemeyer had over-designed and over-engineered the MK Tank. It was too heavy.” Heemeyer added an extra 25 tons to the dozer’s already considerable mass, making it weigh as much as a school bus. As a result, once he got stuck in the basement of Gambles, he stood no chance of escaping. Meanwhile, the extra weight also caused the machine to overheat and its radiator to burst. Fittingly, it was Heemeyer’s hubris that slowly killed his Killdozer.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to note how the popular Killdozer narrative describes Marvin Heemeyer at the point in his life when he began planning his revenge: “His business and livelihood were in ruin. Rather than lie down and die, Marvin chose to fight back.” If having more than $400,000 worth of assets counts as having your “livelihood in ruin,” then ruin doesn’t sound half bad. After shutting down his business, Heemeyer didn’t have to hop from mountain town to mountain town searching for work. He wasn’t bagging groceries or working as a Walmart greeter, as far too many people in his age bracket end up doing. He got to enjoy, at least for a time, an idyllic early retirement. People who are actually in dire financial straits typically don’t get to take a year off work snowmobiling. They don’t have $55,000 lying around to spend on frivolous lawsuits. And perhaps this goes without saying—they don’t have the money to build killdozers!

Whatever you want to make of the motivations of Marvin Heemeyer’s antagonists—whether they were truly following the letter of the law or using it as cover to pick on a newcomer—I struggle to find anything remotely sympathetic about Heemeyer’s grievances. His objection seems less to do with the fact that there was a “good ol’ boys club” but that he wasn’t a part of it and was not afforded the special treatment he believed he was entitled to. However, I can easily understand how a libertarian, someone who believes in the right to operate a business free of any considerations about its effect on wider society, might find inspiration in the Killdozer. Many sentiments in Heemeyer’s tapes sound like they could have been uttered by Ayn Rand:

• "It's my life. I am an independent business person and only I am responsible for my future and my income and my livelihood. And they're threatening that and they're pissed off because I'm trying to defend my property and my livelihood against this and that.”
  
  
• “I want to say that I believe that I am an American Patriot. I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe in a level playing field of competition. If you want to change that level playing field of competition to your advantage, basically you give me license to do that also when my opportunity comes around.”  
  
  
• “They have to get some self-esteem, some self-respect, and love their neighbors and not try to deprive them of a right to make a living to have their dreams realized. And it's sad that people down there do that and I'm talking about the leaders of the community. They keep people down because if they didn't, the real cream of the crop would rise to the top and, you know, knock them from their position.”

The narrative that valorizes Heemeyer says he was just “minding his own business” before the government decided to push him around. But if you take on the responsibility of owning and operating a business within a community where other people live, there’s essentially no way to “mind your own business.” When you dump out your waste, it doesn’t just disappear, it ends up becoming someone else’s problem. If the town pays to hook you up to the sewer line, which Heemeyer expected to be done for him, that’s money that comes out of other important services. 

But a key aspect of libertarianism is that it refuses to take these external factors into account, or at least downplays them to the greatest extent possible. This is certainly liberty for the person free from the fetters of government. But I would not feel particularly free if piss and shit were suddenly pouring into my yard. Heemeyer reveals the Janus-face of libertarianism, which expects “non-aggression” on the part of government bureaucracy—even the requirement that human waste end up in the right place is deemed coercive. But the maximum amount of aggression—a Killdozer rolling through the streets and plowing into children and old ladies—is allowed in response. In that sense, Heemeyer is the perfect martyr for the libertarian cause and arguably a predecessor to the class of “small business tyrants” who would come to form the base of the Tea Party movement and eventually Trumpism. There are millions of Marvin Heemeyers around the country busy seething that anyone would dare govern or regulate them. And though most of them are not building killdozers in their garages, some of them marched on the Capitol four years ago, while others are driving a figurative killdozer through labor law in states and cities around the country and using lobbying groups to get rid of rights as basic as mandated water and lunch breaks for their employees. Whatever their methods of reaction, their core tenet is the same as Heemeyer’s—that they are the “cream of the crop,” and the expectation that they exist cooperatively among the rest of society is the sole thing keeping them from rising.