On the morning of Wednesday, May 18, 1927, forty-five people died in Bath Township, a farming community about ten miles north of Lansing, Michigan. Thirty-eight of them were children. State police and Clinton County officers who investigated that day traced every death to one man: Andrew Kehoe, a farmer who sat on the township school board as its treasurer, and who was himself among the dead. His wife was the first of the forty-four people attributed to him.
Kehoe was never charged with any crime, because he did not live past that morning. There was no arrest, no indictment and no trial. What the law produced instead was a coroner's inquest, held in Bath Township the following week, whose jury of six of his neighbors found the deaths to be "a deliberate and premeditated plan formulated by Kehoe," found that he had been "sane at all times," and cleared the school board of any blame. That inquest is the only formal legal finding in the case. Every statement about his responsibility rests on it and on the work of the officers who built the record it heard.
Kehoe studied electrical engineering at the state college in East Lansing, the institution now known as Michigan State University, and afterward worked for a time as an electrician in St. Louis.
In 1919 he and his wife bought an eighty-acre farm a short distance from the village of Bath for $12,000, at the inflated prices that followed the First World War. They paid half from the sale of their property in Tecumseh, Michigan. The seller's estate lent them the other half, secured by a mortgage. The buildings were among the best in the township, and Kehoe filled the place with more machinery than an eighty-acre farm required.
He took part in township government. When the township clerk died, Kehoe asked for the post and was appointed in 1925, a small-paying office with plenty of work and little thanks. His books were praised for their neatness and their accuracy. In the spring election of 1926 he lost the clerkship.
The fight that shaped his last years was over the school. Bath voters turned down the first bond proposal for a consolidated school. On a second vote, in 1921, it passed by sixty-eight votes. In 1922 an addition to the village's brick schoolhouse created the Bath Consolidated School, which added a twelfth grade and brought pupils from the surrounding farms into one building. A consolidated school that met the state's standards qualified for state aid toward maintenance, salaries and buses, and over the next five years the school worked for and won accreditation through the University of Michigan.
The new school also brought higher property taxes. Most of the village accepted them as worth the price. Some did not, and Kehoe became the most stubborn of them. He won a seat on the school board and served as its treasurer, and he used both positions against the cost of the school. Witnesses at the inquest spoke again and again of friction between Kehoe and the other members of the board. He tried to keep the school's administration out of board meetings and away from its decisions, and he accused it repeatedly of mismanaging money. The school's leadership was its chief advocate; Kehoe, one witness said, was "very much against it." He won a few early contests and lost the later ones.
For a time he had company in his complaints. One witness remembered him saying that the taxes were so excessively high "he didn't know what would become of us." Once the bonds were approved, though, his continued quarreling with the board wore out the township's patience, and his opposition was pushed to the margins. His term on the board was due to expire in July 1927, and he was not expected to be renominated.
By the spring of 1927 he had stopped paying the installments on the farm. Word in the township was that the mortgage had been foreclosed, and Kehoe told acquaintances that he was ruined. Neighbors noticed that he did no farm work that spring.
The inquest heard a different account of the debt. A lawyer for the estate that held the mortgage testified that the payments had fallen into arrears but that no pressure had been put on Kehoe to pay off the loan, and the lawyer was emphatic on the point. Other witnesses described a farm being run down on purpose. Kehoe had left his fields unplanted, had failed to harvest his beans and corn the year before, and shortly before May 18 had cut the bark around the fruit trees so that they would die.
Questions about his money reached his public office too. One theory raised in the first hours after May 18 held that his school accounts were short. Board members said an audit made in the week before had disproved it. On May 14, four days before his death, Kehoe mailed his treasurer's records to the agent who had written his bond, and the accounts balanced to within twenty-three cents.
May 18 was the last day of the school year in Bath, a day of final examinations, and a school picnic had been planned.
His wife had died in the township before the school day began. The attacks on the Bath Consolidated School came shortly after classes started. By the middle of the morning Kehoe was dead in the village, and state police later concluded that he had meant the toll to be far greater than it was.
Thirty-eight children died.
Six adults besides Kehoe died. His wife, Nellie Kehoe, was the first. Among the others were Emory E. Huyck, Hazel Iva Weatherby and Blanche Elizabeth Harte. Two men of the village also died, one of them an older resident of Bath.
Fifty-eight people were hurt.
State police and Clinton County officers took charge on the day itself, working alongside the state fire marshal's office and the Lansing fire department. Their first task was to establish what had been prepared and by whom, and to reconstruct which of the deaths followed from which act.
By the following day the investigating officers had weighed the possibility that someone from outside the township had helped him and had set it aside. Their working conclusion was that Kehoe had conceived and carried out the whole of it alone. The same inquiries disposed of the suspicion about his accounts, which was found to be untrue.
Not every official was satisfied. The state fire marshal doubted that one man could have done all of the preparation, or carried it into the school night after night without help, and said so. The Clinton County prosecutor, whose own inquiries had followed the rumors of an accomplice, reached the opposite view. By May 20 he had discredited those rumors and declared himself convinced that Kehoe had been alone. The official investigation was then adjourned until the following Monday, while the state carried on its work through the weekend.
What the officers assembled in those five days was a timeline that ran back far beyond May 18. The preparations, the inquest jury would find, had begun in October 1925, more than a year and a half earlier, and had continued through the winter of 1926 and 1927. Kehoe had worked in the building with free access that came from his position as treasurer and from his part-time work as the school's electrician.
An inquest was first set for the Bath town hall and then postponed until Monday, May 23, so that officials could make a final check of the dead. When Clinton County authorities convened it, they did so formally into the death of one of the adult victims, but the jury's attention was on Kehoe throughout. The county prosecuting attorney conducted the examination with the county coroner. Nobody in the room disputed who had caused the deaths. The purpose of the hearing was to fix in law a responsibility already attributed to him.
The jury heard testimony from May 23 to May 25. Fifty-four witnesses were called. The first day's evidence, from a neighbor, carried the story back to New Year's Day of 1927, when Kehoe had admitted to him an act that the prosecutor presented to the jury as the first trial of the plan. Witnesses from the board described the quarrels over the school and its cost. The lawyer for the estate testified about the mortgage, and neighbors described the state of the farm. Many of the witnesses had seen him in the village that morning and testified that they knew him on sight.
The jury of six of Kehoe's neighbors retired on the evening of Wednesday, May 25, and returned its verdict after six minutes. It found that he had killed his wife in the township in the days before May 18, and that the deaths at the school were "a deliberate and premeditated plan formulated by Kehoe." It closed with a finding about his state of mind: "We find that Andrew P. Kehoe was sane at all times, and so conducted himself and concealed his operations that there was no cause to suspicion of the above acts." The jury concluded that he had acted on his own, and it exonerated the school board of any wrongdoing.
The sanity finding was pointed. In the first days after May 18, newspapers had described Kehoe as insane and blamed the school taxes for driving him to it. The jury, after three days of testimony about his preparations, his finances and his quarrels with the board, rejected that picture. The fire marshal's doubts about a lone actor did not change the verdict either.
No charge followed, because there was no one left to charge. The verdict officially closed the case, and the inquest record remains the only legal account of it.
Whether Kehoe had help was the one open question of the investigation. The state fire marshal doubted that a single man could have done the preparation, and officials at first could not rule out an accomplice. The county prosecutor's inquiries discredited the rumors, the inquest jury concluded that he acted alone, and no other person was ever accused.
The state of his finances is disputed. Kehoe spoke of ruin and the township believed the farm had been foreclosed. The lawyer for the estate that held the mortgage testified that the debt was in arrears but that no pressure had been put on him to pay it.
His state of mind was settled only by the inquest jury, which found him sane. No doctor examined him and no criminal court ruled on it.
His motive rests on circumstance. In the year before May 18 he lost his clerkship, lost his long fight over the school taxes, faced the end of his board term and fell behind on his mortgage. He left no testimony that a court could weigh.
1919: Kehoe and his wife buy an eighty-acre farm near Bath for $12,000, half of it on a mortgage held by the seller's estate.
1921: On a second vote, Bath voters approve bonds for a consolidated school by sixty-eight votes.
1922: An addition to the village school creates the Bath Consolidated School, with twelve grades.
1925: Kehoe is appointed Bath Township clerk after the death of the previous clerk.
October 1925: The inquest jury later dates the start of his preparations to this month.
Spring 1926: Kehoe loses the township clerk election.
January 1, 1927: A neighbor later testifies that Kehoe admitted to him an act the prosecutor called the first trial of the plan.
Spring 1927: Kehoe stops paying the installments on his mortgage.
May 14, 1927: Kehoe mails his school treasurer's records to his bond agent; the accounts balance to within twenty-three cents.
May 18, 1927: Forty-five people die in Bath Township, thirty-eight of them children; Kehoe dies the same day.
May 19, 1927: Investigating officers set aside the theory of an outside accomplice.
May 20, 1927: The Clinton County prosecutor says his inquiries have discredited the rumors of an accomplice; the official investigation is adjourned until Monday.
May 23, 1927: The coroner's inquest opens; fifty-four witnesses are called over three days.
May 25, 1927: After six minutes, the jury of six finds that Kehoe acted alone in a "deliberate and premeditated plan," finds him "sane at all times," and exonerates the school board.