Note: Portions of this post originally appeared in my blog, My Michigan, which details unique people, places, and events in the Great Lakes State.

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America’s worst school-related mass murder took place on May 18, 1927 in the sleepy community of Bath, Michigan, located a few miles northeast of the state capital, Lansing.

The Bath School Disaster is a little-known event, having been pushed from national headlines a few days after it occurred by Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight. However, it’s one of the nation’s most significant tragedies; 45 people (mostly children) lost their lives and another 58 were injured at the hands of a deranged local man, Andrew Kehoe, who bombed the school over slights he believed he had suffered at the hands of fellow community members.

Kehoe had purchased a farm in Bath in 1919 and quickly became a thorn in the sides of local leaders. He was an intelligent man, but impatient and frugal. One source of his ire was the Bath Consolidated School , which the community had built so that all the district’s students could attend a single school, rather than divide themselves among the one-room schoolhouses that dotted the area. Kehoe railed against the higher taxes the consolidated school required, but construction proceeded regardless, and the school opened in 1922.

Kehoe eventually served as treasurer of the consolidated school board, where his combative personality and penny-pinching ways made him a difficult person with whom to work. During this time, Kehoe suffered a series of financial and emotional setbacks; his wife was sick with tuberculosis, he couldn’t pay his bills, and, in 1926, his mortgage company announced the start of foreclosure proceedings on his farm. Many students of the disaster believe that Kehoe’s “last straw” was the fact that he lost a race for town clerk in 1926; it was after this supposed slight that he developed his plans to bomb the school.

Kehoe began stockpiling explosives, which he planted in the school’s basement under the guise that he was working on its lighting system. On May 18, 1927, a few days shy of graduation, Kehoe set his plan in motion. Sometime in the days before the bombing, he had killed his wife, Nellie. Around 8:45 a.m. on the 18th, Kehoe set off firebombs he had wired throughout his farm. (Nellie’s body would later be found there, in the charred remains of a chicken coop.) At almost the same time, an alarm clock set by Kehoe detonated the explosives he had planted under the school. The school’s north wing collapsed into a heap of rubble, taking its young occupants and their teachers with it.

Kehoe’s deadly work wasn’t done. As volunteers rushed between his farm and the school, trying to save whoever they could, Kehoe drove his truck, loaded with explosives and metal shrapnel, into town, and parked it near the school. He called to Superintendent Emory Huyck, with whom Kehoe had a fractious relationship. Huyck approached the truck. A witness later testified that he saw Kehoe and Huyck grapple over a gun that Kehoe had brought with him. Suddenly, the truck exploded, killing both Kehoe and Huyck, as well as three other people (including an eight-year-old boy). The blast injured several others.

By the time Kehoe was done wreaking his vengeance, 45 people (including Kehoe and his wife) had died, and 58 had been injured. More would surely have died but for the fact that the explosives Kehoe had wired under the school’s south wing did not detonate, possibly because of a short circuit caused by the first explosion.

While Bath struggled to recover, donations poured in from across the nation, including $75,000 from James J. Couzens, Michigan’s U.S. Senator. In 1928, the new James Couzens Agricultural School opened on the site of the consolidated school building, and served students until its demolition in 1975. The site now contains a memorial park, the centerpiece of which is a cupola that survived the school bombing. The cupola pays tribute to those who lost their lives in one of the deadliest tragedies in Michigan’s—and the nation’s—history.

Caryl Chessman spent 12 years on California’s death row protesting his 1948 conviction on 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape. Throughout his time as a ward of the state, Chessman wrote several books, letters, and essays claiming his innocence. He also filed a number of appeals, insisting that officials had not properly conducted his trial. Chessman’s tale of injustice was so compelling, it earned him eight stays of execution, as well as the support of public figures like author Norman Mailer, poet Robert Frost, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and pastor Billy Graham, all of whom appealed for clemency on his behalf.

Despite Chessman’s very public efforts to avoid execution, his luck ultimately ran out and he entered the gas chamber in San Quentin Prison on May 2, 1960. Yet even the finality of that act seemed in doubt when a call came minutes later, delivering a message from a federal judge who had issued yet another stay of execution. However, prison officials insisted that the call had arrived too late and that they couldn’t open the chamber without endangering the lives of staff members. (Newspapers reported that the secretary who placed the call had misdialed during her first attempt, and that had her initial call gone through, it would have arrived before the execution began.) So it was that, after years of legal wrangling, 39-year-old Chessman met his long-delayed, yet somehow still premature, end.

The fact that Chessman spent most of his adult life behind bars probably didn’t surprise people who knew him as a teenager. Born Carol Whittier Chessman in St. Joseph, Michigan in 1921, Chessman (who later changed the spelling of his first name) moved to California with his family in 1922. As a teenager, he engaged in a series of petty crimes—mostly car thefts—that led to his incarceration in youth lockups. Then, as a member of the “Boy Bandit Gang,” he took part in robberies for which he received jail time in adult prisons. He was released in 1947.

The crimes that led to Chessman’s demise occurred shortly after that, in January 1948. A series of armed robberies in the greater Los Angeles area kept police on high alert, especially once the culprit began pulling over couples in cars, stealing their possessions, and sexually assaulting the female occupants. The so-called “Red Light Bandit” hadn’t murdered anyone, but the public feared what would happen if his crime spree continued.

Witness statements allowed police to issue an all-points bulletin for the mystery assailant. Within hours of the bulletin’s release, officers apprehended Chessman and an accomplice, David Knowles, in a car that had been used during a robbery earlier that month. A few days after his arrest, Chessman confessed to the Red Light Bandit’s crimes (though he later said that police had coerced the confession). At Chessman’s trial, he was found guilty of 17 of the 18 charges against him. Knowles was also found guilty, though because he faced fewer charges than Chessman, he avoided the death penalty. Knowles’ convictions were thrown out in 1950.

That Chessman faced the death penalty for a crime other than murder was an anomaly brought about by the existence of so-called “Little Lindbergh Laws,” which many states passed following the kidnapping and murder of 1-year-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. in 1932. Under California law, kidnapping became a death-penalty offense if committed with the intent to do bodily harm. The fact that Chessman dragged women from their cars to assault them was considered just such an offense, and led to his execution. The Little Lindbergh Laws are no longer in effect.

In addition to his autobiography, “Cell 2455, Death Row,” Chessman’s story is the subject of several books, as well as a 1955 movie with the same title as his autobiography.

Note: This post originally appeared in my blog, My Michigan, which details unique people, places, and events in the Great Lakes State.

It’s a typical love story, told in countless romance novels. A poor boy meets a rich girl and works tirelessly to elevate his social standing so that he can win her affection. The boy woos the girl, marries her, and spirits her away to a life of comfort and luxury in the big city. Then, when the girl’s parents come to visit the newlyweds in their posh new home, the boy kills them.

Okay, so the marriage of Arthur Warren Waite (the boy) and Clara Peck (the girl) was not a storybook romance, a fact with which Clara’s ill-fated parents, John and Hannah Peck, would likely agree. The sad saga of the Peck family began when Waite started dating Clara during high school, shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Waite came from a family of farmers, while Clara enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle made possible by the fortune her father had earned as co-founder of Peck Brothers Drug Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The lovebirds continued their romance after Waite left for The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied dentistry, and later for postgraduate work at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, from which he graduated with honors. The newly minted physician found his way to South Africa, where he served as chief dentist for a mining company. However, Clara was never far from his thoughts and Waite eventually returned to Grand Rapids in 1914 to speed up their courtship.

Trouble was already brewing between Waite and his sweetheart’s family; John Peck disapproved of the relationship, insisting that Waite was too ambitious. However, his concerns fell on deaf ears, and Clara married Waite in Grand Rapids in September 1915. Perhaps as a peace offering, John gave the newlyweds an apartment in Manhattan, where Waite and Clara moved shortly after their marriage and where Waite set up a dental practice.

If Waite had been as diligent about maintaining his practice as he was about playing tennis and hooking up with married women, John and Hannah Peck might have lived the rest of their lives in peace. As it was, not long after arriving in New York City, Waite began an affair with a wealthy married woman, and realized that he needed money to keep his new honey satisfied. Though his in-laws gave him and Clara a monthly stipend, the amount wasn’t enough to please Waite. He hatched a plan to get his hands on the rest of the Pecks’ fortune, and put it into action in January 1916, when Hannah Peck arrived in New York to visit her daughter and son-in-law.

Hannah likely relished the chance to relax and catch up with her family while spending time in a fast-paced, cosmopolitan city. However, ten days after her arrival, she was dead, and her cremated remains sent back to Grand Rapids. Waite insisted on overseeing the cremation and funeral preparations so that the rest of the grieving family would be spared the task.

John Peck mourned his deceased wife, but was also grateful for the way Waite had taken charge of the situation. The eldest Peck decided a visit to his daughter and son-in-law was in order, and he arrived in New York City in March 1916. In an eerie coincidence, he, like his wife, died not long after. As he had done after Hannah’s death, Waite insisted that a quick cremation and return to Grand Rapids was in order. However, Clara and her brother, Percy, resisted, saying that their father was so well-known in his hometown that mourners would certainly want to see his body.

Not wanting to invite suspicion, Waite gave in, but his murderous plot was already unraveling. When Percy returned to Grand Rapids, he received a telegram from an unknown person, “K. Adams,” that urged him to have his father’s body examined. (It was later revealed that a Peck relative, Elizabeth Hardwicke, had sent the telegram after seeing Waite parade around New York City with his mistress.) Percy arranged for the exam, during which physicians discovered traces of arsenic and chloroform in his father’s body. Their conclusion was that John Peck and, in all probability, his wife Hannah, had been murdered.

At first, Clara insisted that her husband had nothing to do with her parents’ suspicious deaths, but the evidence quickly mounted against Waite. The man who embalmed John Peck told police that Waite offered him money to put arsenic in the embalming fluid, so that examiners would attribute the presence of that substance in John’s body to the embalmer’s work, and not to Waite’s deadly deeds. (Though the embalmer accepted the money, he never spiked the fluid with arsenic.) Police also found an atomizer that Waite had filled with typhoid and anthrax germs, and had then given to Clara when she caught a cold. (Clara refused to inhale from it, a decision that likely saved her from becoming the third Peck to die at the hands of Arthur Waite.)

The evidence against Waite was piling up, and Waite, seeing no way out, tried to kill himself with sleeping pills before finally confessing to the murders of John and Hannah Peck. Waite said he had dosed the couple with anthrax and typhoid strains that he had stolen from a hospital. While Hannah died right away, John hadn’t perished quickly enough for Waite, who eventually resorted to arsenic. When that still didn’t work, Waite smothered John to death with chloroform.

The reason for Waite’s crimes? Money, plain and simple. Waite had set his sights on the Peck fortune when he was just a kid, and everything he did afterward–courting Clara, graduating from The University of Michigan (through which he had cheated his way to a degree), and attending the University of Glasgow (where he forged papers stating that he had graduated from the institution)–moved Waite closer to that goal. The dentist admitted that he planned to kill everyone in the Peck family, so despite the fact that Clara and Percy Peck lost their parents to a deranged sociopath, they were also lucky in a sense, as they had escaped his murderous clutches.

Waite was tried and convicted for his crimes, and executed in the electric chair on May 1, 1917. John and Hannah Peck are buried in Oakhill Cemetery in Grand Rapids.