Interlude: A musing on the patience of the justice system regarding Brett Kimberlin

Anyone closely familiar with the Speedway Bombings will understand what I mean when I say I have a few 36th anniversary articles planned to go up soon. But in the meantime, I want to step away from that path and talk a little about Brett Kimberlin's history with the justice system.

In 1972, then 18-year old Brett Kimberlin received a three year probation sentence for "juvenile delinquency." This mild charge was given to him for drug related offenses. The events in question happened when Brett Kimberlin was 17, which might be one reason for the mild charge. This sentence was given by a federal judge: Judge William E. Steckler.

What Steckler didn't realize in July 1972 is that Kimberlin had given at least two blatantly contradictory versions of events to a federal grand jury that had indicted him in relation to their investigation of drug problems at Kimberlin's high school. The next year, at age 19,Kimberlin was convicted of perjury for lying to this grand jury.

That wasn't the last time Brett Kimberlin was to meet Judge William E. Steckler. Steckler was also the presiding judge in the trial that convicted Brett Kimberlin of the Speedway Bombings in 1981. After the conviction, there was a sentencing hearing. Kimberlin was invited to speak prior to the sentencing. He gave a speech proclaiming his innocence and intention to appeal vigorously. He told the judge he had with him thousands of signatures from supporters. He then announced he had been convicted on the basis of perjured testimony.

The judge declined to see the thousands of signatures. He gave a disappointed lecture to Kimberlin which included this part referring to the 1972 probation sentence:

And so I am disappointed; I am disappointed that I took it upon myself to exercise the courage to put you on probation the first time you were ever in trouble. I am sorry that you let us down. [...] I am convinced after hearing the evidence that you are not only guilty of the offenses with which you were charged but that you have not done one single thing to cooperate with the government to clarify what may have happened or what did happen which you could help clarify.

(Above from page 181 of Citizen K.) After hearing another completely uncontrite statement from Kimberlin, the judge sentenced him to 50 years, much less than the 93 years the prosecutors recommended. Thus, Brett's sentence ends in 2031 and he is a federal parolee until then. This is true notwithstanding the apparent fact that Brett has, for years, been spreading vague rumors that he is not on parole, including laughably stupid rumors that he was, perhaps secretly, exhonerated. Brett even made statements along these lines under oath in court hearings within the past few years, which is one reason why his recent lawfare victims are at pains to make sure Brett Kimberlin's history of perjury is taken more seriously. Anyone familiar with both recent events and Brett Kimberlin's authorized biography must conclude that Brett's criminal and victimizing ways have not really improved.

Judge Steckler's statements strongly suggest that he was always waiting for an opportunity to give Brett Kimberlin a break. I write this blog to show that it's well past time for Brett Kimberlin's victims to be the ones given a break.

What happened to the gun that was used to shoot Julia Scyphers?

tl;dr version

It's sometimes interesting to rearrange the story to add suspense or mystery, but I'll do the exact opposite. Trigger man William Bowman, at some point, gave the murder weapon back to Brett Kimberlin. Next, some time in fall 1978, Brett buried it one night in the Texas yard of Julia Scyphers' daughter Louise, in hopes of framing her (or her husband) for his own crimes. Kimberlin had also buried a bunch of his unused explosives and bomb parts along with the murder weapon, so he also tried to frame her for that - but, we'll come back to the bombings in later posts.

Murder weapon turned over to law enforcement

Louise, for her part, wasn't as dumb as Kimberlin hoped everyone would be. On March 10, 1979, she raked up a plastic bag full of bomb parts and the rifle while she was doing yardwork. She immediately got in contact with law enforcement, resulting in the ATF coming to her home to collect a gym bag full of bomb parts, including Tovex packages with deliberately defaced serial codes, as well as a Colt AR-15 with the serial number filed off. For various reasons, the law enforcement agents had to quietly sit on this evidence for a couple of years, with Kimberlin meanwhile unaware of exactly whether law enforcement had even found out about the incriminating bag.

Brett Kimberlin's first framing attempts underway

Kimberlin, meanwhile, had already previously begun his attempts to get law enforcement chasing Louise's family for both the Scypher murder and the bombings. For example, when he was arrested (alongside William Bowman, as it happened) in February 1979 due to a different part of his prolific crime spree, Kimberlin had a long interview with law enforcement in which he encouraged agents to look into Louise's household in relation to the Scyphers murder. Indeed, for 1978 and 1979, it seems to have been Kimberlin's main hope to blame his recent violent crimes on Louise and her husband, perhaps in part because he had correctly inferred that they were able to give law enforcement valuable evidence helping to establish Brett Kimberlin's guilt. Again, more on this in later posts.

Cold case murder

Now, Brett Kimberlin and William Bowman never ended up facing charges for the Julia Scyphers murder. The problem is that the sole closeup eyewitness to Bowman's visit was Fred Scyphers, and he died of cancer before the case could be brought to trial. Therefore, prosecutors focused on getting Kimberlin for his bombs and other crimes instead.

In court

Over time, Kimberlin offered the courts a series of different false stories of how someone else may have actually had possession of Brett's bomb-making materials, but none of these were believed and he got convicted anyway. For the courts, he ended up forgetting his attempt to frame Louise's family, possibly because his lawyers were smart enough to see that it couldn't possibly work. But then, to the total surprise of Brett Kimberlin and his defense team, in the 1981 trial that convicted him, the government suddenly brought witnesses, including Louise and a drug wholesaler who was actually in the car with Kimberlin when Kimberlin surreptitiously crept into Louise's neighborhood late one night with his bag. The framing attempt was now front and center and helped put together better chain of custody explanations for his bombing crimes (which, again, I will handle in separate articles). The point about the AR-15 being included in the buried bag was not belabored in court because the government was focused on winning on the bombing charges and did not want to risk losing on the bombing charges by connecting them to the shooting incident that no longer had a living eyewitness.

About that AR-15

On page 174 of Brett Kimberlin's own authorized biography, writer Mark Singer caught Kimberlin saying something he couldn't have possibly known unless he actually planted the bombs and weapons in Louise's yard. You see, I told the history more or less in chronological order, but that's not the order Singer had to learn it in. Interviewing about the trial, on page 174, Kimberlin unthinkingly complained to his authorized biographer that Indianapolis Star newspaper writer Gelarden had written about a report "that the Scyphers murder weapon was buried in the Crosbys' backyard." One problem with Brett's complaint is that nobody had written about the murder weapon being buried. (In fact, as far as I could tell, there are no suggestions in the press that Kimberlin ever knew anything specific about the murder weapon until Kimberlin accidentally admitted here to Singer that he knew where it had ended up.) Singer re-checked every newspaper article and found no reference to the murder weapon ever being buried. And, remember, the Scyphers murder wasn't even discussed in Brett Kimberlin's bombing trial, only the bombings. Witnesses provided testimony about how forensic evidence tied the bomb related contents of the buried gym bag to the Speedway Bombings. They didn't mention anything connecting the rifle in the bag to the Scyphers murder. As Singer put it, "When a person claims to know where a murder weapon is buried, even if he's trying to finger someone else, what does that imply?" (page 175). Oops.

Conclusion

Brett Kimberlin tells too many lies to keep them all straight.

There is no statute of limitations on murder in Indiana.

Friday was a good day for the morale of Kimberlin victims

Current events

On Friday, August 1, we learned that Brett Kimberlin was ordered to pay sanctions (hopefully first of many) for one of his attempts to play unconscionable, outrageous games with the discovery process and make a mockery of justice. This event calms fears that Brett can commit whatever abuses he wants by flashing  the "I'm just a stupid pro se" card. Besides this, noted free speech paladin Paul Alan Levy wrote a post called Brett Kimberlin’s Dilemma, which shows the fallacy behind much of what Kimberlin has said recently to defend his indefensible methods. Paul's post has also received some favorable coverage, which is encouraging since Brett's desire seems to be to commit crimes under cover of silence or misdirection.

It is not really my intention to become a current events blogger. Hogewash! is already doing an admirable job of covering current events in the Brett Kimberlin matters. It's also not my intent to add legal commentary to Paul's work, since I don't have the background to do it and he's already doing that himself. Although I do want to belabor one point he made, i.e., the law already prescribes how litigants should properly serve anonymous defendants. Brett Kimberlin is pointedly avoiding the law on this, which points back to his three goals. One, he wants to try to win a default judgment against at least some defendants. Clearly this is one of his goals  in mind and it's the same reason he keeps committing forgery and perjury in his "diddling" with service rules on ALL the defendants in his different frivolous lawsuits. Two, he wants his online critics to give him personal information he and his supporters can use to harass those critics. Three, he wants to deter any future critics by leveraging goals #1 and #2. There's no defending what Kimberlin is doing and his complaints about defendants playing games with service are just attempts to confuse onlookers. Even if Kimberlin didn't originally understand the underlying law, he's now had it well explained to him by legal experts so (given we are talking about convicted perjurer and forger Brett Kimberlin here) the only reasonable explanation for his "misunderstanding" on the point is that he's actually purposefully lying. But enough about that.

Back to the big picture

Levy's post raised a sensitive issue that should interest followers of this saga, namely, the difficulty posed for children of notorious criminals. Now, Levy's purpose was to dissuade Kimberlin from his apparent threat to put his own children in a more difficult position. Levy's points seem correct to me and I don't have more to say about that. What I do want is to think out loud about what it is like for the innocent to actually be in that position.

In my offline persona, I have known a handful of conmen. Just a little beneath the surface, they are not normally the charming rogues of fiction. They can be vicious, manipulative, grasping people who don't give two thoughts about the amount of pain they inflict on those close to them. I am acquainted with some people who were raised by a con man who was, for a time, very successful. He stole millions of dollars, and did it while pretending to be an important, adept, highly connected financier. His public persona was that of a man who demanded respect and admiration for his deeds. He basked in the esteem gained from his social status and wealth, all of which seems to have been stolen in various pure scams. His sons made it a ways into adulthood not having any idea what their father's true business was. They just knew he was very special and their household was very special. When the house of cards came tumbling down, they had to confront the fact that their affluence had all been built on lies. Can you imagine what it was like, having friends and family hearing scandalous gossip about your father's 7-figure heist? Can you imagine later meeting a friend who learned that your father was jailed for being a great thief? Especially if that friend was used to thinking of you as being a refined, wealthy person.

I won't fully understand the experience myself, but for those who went through it, it was a difficult life changing experience. One of the children of the conman I describe above is a young adult but now quite lost about who he is and what he wants to be. He used to know, but that was taken away from him in a painful way that made him feel foolish for also having been, in a very real sense, conned. But I must say that my respect for these sons went up hugely when I learned what they'd been through, and I suddenly understood the attitude they had toward social status and appearance as children, and I was impressed at their efforts to grow past the turmoil. Other acquaintances of mine confirmed this view of holding the children in much greater esteem after understanding what they had actually gone through. Another great benefit of when the scams folded is that the children had been kept out of touch with some of their family by the machinations of their conman father. It's really heartening to see those walls torn down after decades.

Reader, none of the above is even much changed in details. I just removed some more nitty-gritty details in the unlikely event that a more detailed post would bring undue attention to the innocent involved. These are real incidents I'm familiar with, which involved millions in scam profits by a conman and his confederate, who was only after decades, by chance, caught by cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies in multiple countries.

I hope followers of the Brett Kimberlin saga will think about the story above, and contrast it with other worse possible outcomes. It's important to understand that there are always innocents involved somehow - often closely involved - in crimes. This is one of the reasons it's so beneficial for the good guys to only use just and ethical means.

Pardon the rambling nature of my post. The analogy between Brett Kimberlin, and the conman I knew from my own acquaintances, has been in my head for quite a while and Paul Alan Levy's post compelled me to think aloud about it.

Why did Brett Kimberlin do it? Why have Julia Scyphers shot, and then bomb Speedway?

What motivated Brett Kimberlin to have Julia Scyphers shot to death?

Before we get into the minutiae of history, I want to summarize the big picture. The briefest practical summary is: Brett Kimberlin had Julia Scyphers killed because Scyphers stood in the way of Brett's affair with Scyphers' underage granddaughter. The bombings that followed a month later were a foolish and failed attempt to throw the small, overwhelmed local police department off his trail. The bombings had the opposite effect.

Debbie Barton, age 10, and Brett Kimberlin, age 20: the relationship begins

The sick relationship started when Debbie Barton, granddaughter of Julia Scyphers, was 10 and Brett Kimberlin was 20. By age 20, Brett not only already had a federal perjury conviction to his name, he also had a small fortune in profits from his criminal international drug smuggling enterprise. Around this time, he made a home on his newly acquired 300 acre property. On this property he built a 4000 square foot house, complete with a hidden gunrack, underground escape tunnel accessible via secret passageway, secret camouflaged exit at the other end of that tunnel, and underground storage tanks for things like marijuana and airplane fuel. Also housed on the property were Kimberlin's several cars, which always included a rapidly rotated cast of cheap throwaway "burner" cars he'd bought under false names or through straw purchasers. He also had a horse trailer, which was sometimes used for hauling huge loads of marijuana, but frequently used for its normal intended purpose of moving horses. Brett kept several horses on his property, which took substantial work to care for. Brett's mother introduced him to someone named Sandra Barton, who agreed to help take care of Brett's horses in return for being allowed to keep one of her own horses at Brett's stables.

Sandra Barton met Brett's mother at her workplace in a university lab in Indianapolis. At some point, Brett also gave her a part-time job at his natural food store (which may have been largely a money laundering front). Sandra was a single mother who had two daughters about two years apart. The youngest one, Deborah Barton, was aged 10 when Brett first met her. She soon received extraordinarily special attention from him.

Brett's activities with young Debbie were numerous and varied. Singer's books describes "weekly after-school outings." They spent time riding horses, both on Brett's property and on camping trips to parks. In the summers of 1974, 1975, and 1976, Brett and Debbie went alone on unchaperoned week-long trips to Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii (Debbie's mother could not arrange time off work to attend these outings). In Brett's authorized biography Citizen K, author Mark Singer notes that Brett Kimberlin introduced the underaged Debbie to one of his drug smuggling colleagues as "my girlfriend" (p.78). Another drug smuggling colleague noted of the way Brett talked about her, "It made me very uncomfortable." Singer also notes Brett often spent the night sleeping over at the Barton's apartment when he was "too tired" to drive all the way home, which then Singer drily notes was "all of six miles away." Also on page 78 is what Debbie's own mother thought she knew about the relationship:

To a coworker at IU-PIU, Sandi confided that Kimberlin was "grooming [Debbie] to be his wife." To another, Sandi explained that though Kimberlin's relationship with [Debbie] was chaste, he intended "to wait for her and would marry her."

Right after this quote, biographer Mark Singer retells what he saw when he asked Brett to see any photographs Brett had of the family. Singer recounts, "he could find only the one school picture of [Debbie's older sister] and none of Sandi, but he had a trove of snapshots of [Debbie]." After describing some examples in this "trove," Singer chose this interesting turn of phrase to describe his impression of the pictures:

"a nymphet worthy of the heart-piercing torment of Humbert Humbert."

 "Humbert Humbert" is a clear reference to the main character of Lolita, the most famous novel about pedophilia. The underage objects of Humbert Humbert's obsessions are referred to in the book as "nymphets." It's plain why Singer referred to a novel about pedophilia after recounting Brett's "trove" of pictures of his underage "girlfriend" whom he was "grooming to be his wife." Brett's own authorized biography effectively calls him a pedophile, in so many words. Singer then chose to spend the following page of the biography recounting Brett's response to another strange feature of the photographs Brett had showed him, which is that Brett seems to have spent a lot of time hanging around with the Bartons while nude.

In the summer of 1978, when Brett was 24 and Debbie Barton was 14, the two had a falling out. Debbie began finding excuses to not meet with Brett. She also objected to his out-of-town trips, which she correctly suspected had to do with something bad. It seems to have been some time around this falling-out period that Brett Kimberlin reportedly slapped Debbie on at least two occasions, and tried to bring her in line by taking away her beloved family dog (page 173). Anyway,

When [Sandra Barton] [...] asked Brett, in May or June of 1978, to stay away from her daughter, he became very upset and said it wasn't worth going on anymore.

Notwithstanding Brett's suicide threat, Debbie's grandmother Julia Scyphers seems to have been all on board with this idea of Brett staying away. Besides repeatedly turning Brett down for requests about when he could meet Debbie, Scyphers also made arrangements to change the locks on the apartment Sandi and Debbie lived in, to keep Brett out. This move enraged Brett. He intercepted the maintenace man to stop him from changing the lock. Then he further intervened by making false complaints to the management company that ran those apartments. He falsely told them that the apartment was wrecked and the tenants should be evicted. He told the apartment management company that Julia Scyphers was "harassing" him, and was insane, and made it sound like it was important to get the Barton child away from Scyphers' control. The woman working for the management company recalled, "Brett Kimberlin had vengeance on his face when he talked about Mrs. Scyphers. He radiated hatred." Before continuing the story, I would like to note that making false reports to peoples' apartment managers is a tactic that Brett Kimberlin continued using as revenge all the way through the 2000s, in a story I may or may not recount for a later post on this site.

As I already explained in the original post on Julia Scypher's murder, Brett didn't personally kill Julia Scyphers. His drug smuggling colleague William Bowman was positively ID'd by a personal eyewitness who was face to face with Bowman minutes before he shot Scyphers to death. William Bowman was a frequent and relatively close colleague who worked in Kimberlin's drug smuggling operation. He had worked with him quite often prior to shooting Scyphers, and continued working closely with him after both the murder and the bombings. The impression one gets is that Kimberlin may have chosen one of his closer and more trusted (and ruthless) colleagues to carry out the shooting for him. Or maybe Kimberlin's not that discriminating and this is just what popped into his angry head at the time.

Later, we'll talk more about the bombings, but I've already explained their primary purpose in the first paragraph above.