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.