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shadowcanine · 4 days ago

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a deep dive into the cokeville bombing (otherwise known as the cokeville miracle)

this post is for research and educational purposes only. more below the cut.

On May 16th, 1986, in the small and rural town of Cokeville, Wyoming, a couple, David and Doris Young, entered Cokeville Elementary School. They were equipped with firearms, as well as a large bomb. Information about this event is highly controlled and filtered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but if you look hard enough for something, you’ll find it.

David, anti-government rambler, and Doris, a former cocktail waitress, held 136 students, as well as 18 adults, hostage in the confines of a singular room- the bomb was in the room with them. Their plan was to blow the school to smithereens, killing everybody (including themselves) inside. The plan was not successful- if it had been, it would have been the worst school massacre in the history of the United States; second to none.

“So who the hell is David?”

David Young was described as “too intelligent for his own good” with many of his writings often consisting of anti-government ramblings and a feeling of an impending sense of doom, among other things. Despite David’s alleged intelligence, many have stated he had little to no common sense. He’s described as having viewed those around him to be intellectually inferior, and he struggled with maintaining any relationship that wasn’t surface level.

Ron Hartley, the Lincoln County Sherrif’s Office lead investigator, has gone on the record to say the following regarding David:

“He would just talk way over their heads or talk about things that did not make sense to your average person.”

David’s first wife has said he was a “non-drinker” who claimed to be “agnostic.” She also described him as being “gun crazy.” David was known for always having countless firearms around. He also kept many journals nearby, he recorded quite trivial things, such as what he ate in a day and when. In total, 43 diaries were left behind ranging in location from his van, to his hotel room. Several manifestos were also composed, mainly talking about his “Brave New World” (or BNW) philosophies.

David wrote of hijacking a plane, and FBI behavioral analysts concluded he had “no real plans of ever having a career in anything.”

It’s important to note that David had a child, named Princess. Keep that in mind.

“Okay, so what happened?”

May 15th, 1986. Davis gathers his “team” (consisting of his wife, Doris, his daughter, Princess, and two investors. One investor was his cousin, Gerald Deppe, the other was his hunting buddy, Doyle Mendenhall) at a nearby hotel in Montpelier, Idaho.

Princess recounts the bathtub being full of “weird stuff” including, but not limited to; flour, tuna cans, string, and clothespins. David turns to Princess and tells her that “if she wants to be apart of The Biggie (David’s codename for the bombing, which the team originally believed was a get-rich-quick scheme) she would have to sleep with him.” Princess told him fathers don’t do that with their daughters. David spent the rest of the night watching Princess- as if he was afraid she was going to run.

May 16th, 1986. After deciding on Cokeville, Wyoming, David sits on a hill with binoculars- he’s surveying Cokeville elementary. He picked Cokeville due to it’s low law enforcement presence, and it’s allegedly “extremely bright students.”

Once all the students were confirmed to be inside the school, David drops the truth about “The Biggie” to his team. His wife, daughter, and investors are horrified.

“We were all like mouths dropped open. Like, what the hell is going on right now? All of us did not want anything to do with it. Even [my stepmom.] [doris]”

David handcuffed the investors, his cousin and friend, to the inside of the van. After around 15 minutes of coercion, he gets Doris to agree to come along. Princess was coerced into wheeling the bomb into the school, as well as carrying some guns.

When Young arrived at the school, he’s reported having told staff “this is a revolution. I’m taking the school hostage.”

Princess did not want to be apart of this. In an interview, she states:

“I saw all these little children’s faces running back and forth in a hallway. And I’m like ‘how can I grab these children? How can I save them?’ but of course, I was trembling so bad and I dropped a couple guns.”

Teachers at Cokeville recounted Princess begin to cry, then scream at her father. She couldn’t believe he was going to go through with this.

David didn’t get angry, but he did toss the keys of the van to Princess and state:

“You’ve been a good kid, but you’re no daughter of mine.”

She almost wrecked the van leaving the parking lot.

1PM Princess bursts into Town Hall. She screams that she needed help, but nobody was listening to her.

Princess then shouted “you stupid fucking people! What in the hell is the matter with you? Don’t you give a fuck about your kids? My father’s over there and he’s going to blow them all up!”

The firefighters at the Town Hall, rather than helping, berated her for her use of foul language, and stated something to the effect of “this isn’t Chicago. This is Cokeville, things like that don’t happen here.”

Princess led the firefighters to the van- where the investors were still handcuffed inside.

“He’s got enough explosives in there to blow the whole school up, if it goes off, it’s gone. He’s planned this for a long time and it will be gone.”

The dispatcher at the scene, Davison, asked for clarification. When Princess told her, Davison tried to call anybody she could- but the sherrif was out of town. The town marshal was out of town, and Hartley, the one who would later interview Princess, was returning from Utah. She would eventually reach the Uinta County sherriff, but even they wouldn’t believe one of their own. It took awhile for them to actually send any law enforcement to Cokeville.

The SWAT team, as well as a bomb squad, were now mobilized from Jackson- as well as any vehicle equipped with a siren. Cokeville is a small town, and so every school aged kid in the community was currently inside of the school, being held at gunpoint.

One of the bomb’s plastic jugs had a hole in it, causing it to leak gas. The gas was making kids ill, and the teachers convinced David Young to let them open some windows. It would later be discovered that, had the windows stayed shut, there’s a high chance nobody would have made it out of Cokeville Elementary alive. The entire front of the building would have been blown off.

There were several rifles propped against the blackboard in the classroom- those were “for the teachers” according to David. For kids, a .22 pistol. There was also a .45 Colt revolver in David’s other hand.

Young began to hand out leaflets explaining his ideology to the children, but it was incomprehensible to them. The children, according to fourth-grade teacher Kliss Sparks, knew they were in danger much faster than she did.

David Young believed that after the explosion, everybody would be killed. David, however, would be transported to an island with the children- he claimed he would be their leader in the new life.

A ransom of $2m per child was demanded, with David insisting he did not want to have to hurt them, as they were apart of his “BNW”

For two hours, children at Cokeville Elementary colored, sang, and prayed. David was growing more agitated by the minute- sweating profusely. (It was later learned David was a diabetic, and could have been having a reaction.)

In Wyoming, everybody has guns- and so, when people found out their children- or grandchildren were being held hostage, an armed militia soon formed outside of the school. David was not coming out of that school alive- if he managed to, he’d have been shot by every father in Cokeville.

David had a “dead man’s bomb” - If David were to be killed or taken, the bomb would detonate.

Multiple parents had to be talked out of storming the school by the police.

Princess encouraged the police to kill David, if they could.

“He was the dad that raised me, but at this point, you gotta save the other people.”

“So, what happened?”

Well, David’s bomb failed miserably. For the type of bomb he made to have worked, the bottom of the containers would have had to have been dry- but as stated previously, gasoline was leaking. When the bomb was ignited, instead of the fine powders being shot through their air- and then ignited by the gas bottle, only mud came out. If the gasoline wouldn’t have leaked, the bomb would have been successful, and Cokeville very well may have been one of the worst school incidents’ in the history of the United States.

Wires on the bombs were mysteriously severed, and bomb squad couldn’t figure out why.

Two and a half hours into the standoff, David wrapped the Dead Man’s Switch around Doris’ wrist. (In this case, the switch was actually a shoelace- it was attached to a clothespin that kept the positive and negative terminals apart- if they were to touch, it’d be ignited.)

Jean Mitchell, a teacher at the school, had a headache. While talking to Doris, she put her hands on her head and said “I’ve got a headache.”

“Me, too,” said Doris, who put her hands on her head aswell. When she did this, the Dead Man’s Switch was pulled, and the bomb was ignited.

Thick, black smoke filled the room, as well as intense heat- but Doris wasn’t dead. She was on fire, stumbling around the room and begging for help. David returns to the 24x24 music room that the school was being held captive in, and fires the .22 at music teacher John Miller. He was hit in the back, but survived- and has since made a full recovery. Had he been shot with the .45, he would have died.

David then took a shot at Doris, attempting to put her out of her misery- his first shot missed, his second shot hit. Doris is dead. After killing his wife, David flees to the bathroom, where he places the .45 under his chin, and ends his own life.

“So was it over?”

No, we aren’t even at the good part yet.

After the bomb had detonated, and both perpetrators were dead, children began running out of the school.

“Children started flying out those windows and running. They cleared the fences in one leap,” said Walker. For the children that recognized her, they began screaming for her help. “Mrs. Walker, help me! Mrs. Walker, I’m on fire!”

She attempted to console one boy, who pulled out of her arms to look for his grandmother- he was afraid David would come look for them.

Firemen were in the school throwing the children out of the window- as soon as the kids hit the ground, they would take off running- they were covered in soot, some badly burned, but all alive.

Many kids ran straight home. It was later discovered that David told them if they got out, people were waiting to shoot them. They didn’t catch most of the kids before they ran home.

The heat of the fire set off David’s ammunition- the walls were found pierced with bulletholes, but not a single child was hit by a bullet.

One girl, Jamie Buckley King, a third grader at Cokeville Elementary, grew up poor. She made no attempt to escape, thinking she was already in the New World. She only realized she wasn’t dead when she felt somebody pick her up by the shirt and throw her out of the school. She ran to her dad, and then began apologizing because she had left her shoes inside the class. She asked if he wanted her to return to get them.

Not a single Cokeville Elementary student or staff member died. The only deaths that day were David and Doris Young, the perpetrators. Some students and staff were injured, but were quickly taken to the hospital and treated.

“What’s up with the miracle part?”

Later, at least 10 separate children would report seeing angels that helped them through the ordeal.

• Travis Walker told his parents he had a very strong feeling he needed to be by the windows just before the bomb went off. He says a voice told him this.

• Travis had two sisters, who said: “We had a woman who stood by us, she wore little white slippers and we just knew she loved us.” Both girls described their grandmother, who was their mother’s mom, to a T. They had never met her- their grandmother died when their mother was just 15.

• Kids reportedly told police “the angels told us.”

“We didn’t lose one child. We didn’t lose one teacher. We didn’t lose anybody except the perpetrator who killed his wife and himself. There was a lot of intervention.”

Ron Hartley, the cop to interview Princess- did not believe in angels or religion. He didn’t believe anything he couldn’t touch or see. Ron had 4 kids in Cokeville Elementary that day- including his 6 year old son, Nathan. Nathan began showing symptoms of PTSD soon after the incident, as well as extreme nightmares.

Claudia, Ron’s wife, took Nathan to get a mental evaluation. Nathan allegedly told the examiner he “heard and saw angels” and when Claudia relayed this to Ron, he lost it. He hated anybody and everything that had to do with “mental evaluations of people and stuff like that” he was a self-admitted redneck.

Ron’s experience in the police force regarding children not being helped or listened to made him grow a disdain for shrinks.

When Ron returned home, he began to interrogate Nathan- he was going to prove to Nathan that he didn’t see any angels.

Nathan went on to describe his deceased grandmother, using the name of his alive grandmother- when Ron pulled out a photobook, Nathan pointed to his deceased grandmother, and said “that’s her.” Ron tried to correct him, pointing to the grandmother who was still alive (albeit in a nursing home), but Nathan insisted he was talking about the deceased one.

The deceased grandma was grandma Elliot, who Nathan had only met once when he was a year old before she passed. He had never seen a picture of her before.

According to Nathan, everybody had angels- even David and Doris, but David’s left him just before the bomb went off.

The bomb at Cokeville Elementary was supposed to explode outwards, like a grain explosion- it was supposed to radiate 360 degrees. But it didn’t. Instead, the bomb exploded straight up “like a fire bomb” and directly into the ceiling.

Nathan suffers from horrible memory loss regarding the incident now according to his father, and never once brought up the angels again.

(Side note- there was a teacher, Triplett, she was at Cokeville for a job interview. She can’t swear to it, but says she may have been comforted by Nathan. She was praying for a merciful end to her own life when she heard a little boy say “everything’s going to be okay.”)

# That’s all folks, thank you for reading! I genuinely think I have carpal tunnel now, but I wanted to make this post because I never see anybody talk about Cokeville- and in my opinion, it’s one of the most fascinating cases.

# There’s also been a movie released about Cokeville! After the release, the survivors, now adults, reached out to Princess- they gave her love and forgiveness, as this was the first time they understood her role in the situation since that day. The movie is pretty good, if any of you are bored and feel like watching it. It’s no Zero Day, but still. I hope you enjoyed c:

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