I Bombed Judi Bari — The Mystery That Never Really Was

I’m desperate, Bruce. I’d considered bombing you at one time, but two bombings in Mendocino County at that particular time would have been pushing my luck, not that it was luck that I got away with bombing Eliza Devlin, aka Judi Bari as I called her in the novel I was writing about her. Hell, we’re old, and no one except us cares about this stuff anymore.

I live in New Zealand now and plan to stay unless by some fluke you win and I’m extradited. Anyway, here goes:

I’m the only person who knows the whole truth about the bombing of Judi Bari because I did it, and I’ve orchestrated the cover-up for all these years since. The other person who knows the whole truth is dead because I murdered her, albeit in slow motion.

There are quite a few people who know parts of the truth about the bombing, and there are quite a few people who’ve lived off its mythology all these years — literally lived off it in some cases. I’ll name each of these mercenary frauds and explain how each was involved. Why? Because I’m old and far away, and the truth should at last be told.

I bombed Judi Bari in May of 1990. Like Judi, I’m a violent person. She may have been even more violent than me. She might have been crazy too, but all that baloney about “Gandhian non-violence” from her was belied by her real life behavior.

Judi and I fire bombed the hangars at the old Naval air strip southwest of Santa Rosa back in 1980. We were just married. I guess you could say the 1980 bombs we did together in Santa Rosa was our honeymoon.

Before we did that one, which got a big play in the local newspapers, we did minor league sabs of my former wife’s property out in Sebastopol. Her name was Cynthia Denenhotz. I met her at Stanford in ‘68 where we belonged to a commie cult run by an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. We wrecked Cynthia's water pump one time, for instance. Judi loved those late-night sabotage forays. Me too. We were true soulmates.

I first hooked up with Judi Bari at a Maoist labor convention where the federal government probably made up half the participants. We were both labor organizers, more or less, although neither one of us ever had a real job for more than a few weeks.

My estranged first wife, the aforementioned Cynthia Denenholtz, whose water pump Judi and I had sabbed, had restraining orders out on me for harassing her, and as much as I wanted to bomb Cynthia I’m pretty sure I would have got caught because she and I used to be Maoist bombers back at Stanford where we met in 1968. People knew our histories, and they’d have known if I had done it.

But Cynthia, even when we broke up, never threatened to go to the cops about me like Judi did all the time after we moved to Redwood Valley where our marriage ran up on the rocks. In Redwood Valley, Judi even accused me of a Michael Jackson with our youngest daughter. She would say anything if she thought it served her interests, and that’s why I came to hate her.

We’d moved to Redwood Valley from Santa Rosa after we’d scammed Hewlett-Packard by threatening to sue them for their planned development. Our threat worked. They paid us to go away. We used that money to buy a big piece of bare ground on Humphreys Lane in Redwood Valley. We built a spec house on that lot, but we were no longer happy together. Judi wanted more than her share of the money we had, and she wanted to run around all the time with hippies and smoke dope and use speed. I didn’t want my daughters around those people. I wanted to be respectable. I didn’t like hippies, and I still don’t like hippies.

So I started writing recycling grants with some help from Richard Shoemaker, my pal and protector, who was a Mendocino County Supervisor. Shoemaker got Wes Chesbro, the state senator who sat on the state’s garbage board, to shove a half-million tax dollars my way. All I had to do then was get a Fort Bragg lady named Carol O’Neal out of the way of the recycling operation she was running — which I did — and I was up and running, reborn, as the county’s official recycler. Shoemaker and Chesbro got me all set up in Ukiah, even though Mendocino County already had a garbage agency of its own.

But here was Judi Bari running around with Darryl Cherney doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get her name in the paper while I stayed home with the kids, or had to take them with me to my “office” at the Mendocino Environment Center in downtown Ukiah. When I complained about her hippie lifestyle, she’d say, “Fuck you, Mike. I’ll go to the cops and tell them everything we did, all those felonies, if you rat on me.”

Like I was supposed to live with this blackmailer for the next 50 years? She had to go.

Cynthia Denenholtz and I had two kids together before we split up and I married Judi Bari with whom I had two more kids. Cynthia didn’t want to be a radical anymore. Or a snitch. I was still pretending to be a radical and I was a real snitch for the FBI.

There are lots of old sellout rads like us out there; not that I blame any of them for going straight and not that I was ever on the left. I tried to go straight myself in Ukiah but my big mouth wife wouldn’t let me. She was always hanging the bombs we did together in Santa Rosa over my head. And other stuff, too, some of it seriously felonious.

All the temporary radicals we knew then went back to the upper middleclass privilege they’d come out of, and now they all have big houses in the hills. Heck, my house on Running Springs Road, off Orr Springs Road west of Ukiah, is pretty darn big on a pretty darn big 20 acres. If you didn’t know I was a car bomber and an FBI stoolie you’d think I was just like Dan Hamburg! Just another rich Stanford liberal in a big redwood solar house in the hills who’d done real well for himself.

By the way, my house on Running Springs is the only one on the road that isn’t numbered, and don’t ever try to drop in on me because it’s kinda dangerous, if you get my drift. Bruce Anderson and Kate Coleman were up here snooping around one day and they don’t know how close they came. I had both of them in my crosshairs; if either one of them had put one foot on my property — especially Anderson — they’d have both been wherever my ex-wife is now.

Way back in the late 1960s, as I’ve mentioned, I joined Venceremos, a Maoist-oriented college gang based at Stanford. As a kid in Santa Barbara I’d belonged to the Young Republicans, then and now my true people. My dad was a lawyer who worked for Chevron and then was an official in the Nixon Administration. I grew up in a nice house in Santa Barbara. (There are no not nice houses in Santa Barbara.) I never was a liberal, and I certainly never was a radical. I was always for capitalism and its government, but in college I joined the radicals so I could help the government destroy them. (My dad, by the way, always subscribed to the AVA because he was sure I'd have to defend myself in court against all the charges you were making against me in your newspaper.)

There was another Venceremos group that went to Cuba for a couple of weeks every year to cut a few stalks of sugarcane and generally have a good time showing solidarity with Castro. Our Stanford group thought that that Venceremos was a bunch of wimps. Besides which they were Stalinists while we were followers of The Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung, and practically memorized the fortune cookie maxims in his Little Red Book. Yes, we were that dumb. And natural fascists, a lot of us, as I will be the first to admit. A lot of rich kids who went to elite colleges in the 1960s played revolution for a while, and I was one of them. Sort of.

At Stanford, I snitched on the rads for the FBI at the same time as I committed crimes for the revolution, which partially explains why I haven’t been arrested yet for bombing my ex-wife, Judi Bari.

Back in my Stanford days my little group of revolutionaries planted bombs all over the Bay Area. Our leader was an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. He wore leather jackets and stomped around campus like he was a tough guy prole and, of course, slept with his 18 and 19-year-old students. Rich radicals who’ve never worked still act like this. They think it’s “working-class.” It’s patronizing and stupid is what it is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on the Pacifica Network? The professor got some off campus real prole kids killed, but he landed on his feet in another English department without even breaking his tea cup! Being a fake radical in 1969 was the in-thing to do. Until people started getting killed

Judi Bari always pretended to be from the “working-class,” but she grew up in Silver Springs, Maryland, hardly a haven of wage workers. Her parents had been communists, but they weren’t communists by the time Judi was born. They’d been scared straight by events of an earlier era. Very nice people, like my parents, and conventionally successful. Mom was a math prof at Johns Hopkins, Dad a diamond cutter. Judi was a red diaper baby. Her sister, Gina Kolata, went on to become the lead science writer for the New York Times.

By the way, I knew another Mendo guy back at Stanford — Mike Koepf. He lives near Elk on Greenwood Road. He was just out of the Green Berets and back from Vietnam when he was hanging around Stanford in the 1960s. Some of the young writers in Wallace Stegner’s writing program — people like Max Crawford — were weekend radicals at the time. Koepf showed them how to wear camo and how to walk around in the woods looking like guerrillas. Koepf has always been a snitch, just like me. Koepf hated Judi Bari; hated her maybe even more intensely than I hated her, but much as he enjoyed seeing her get blown up, Koepf wouldn’t have had the cojones to do it himself in another 25 life times. He’s afraid of the cops and even more afraid of jail.

Anyway, as you can already see I’m jumping around a lot, chronologically speaking, as I tell my story, but it’s interesting how the 60s have come back to bite so many of us years after we all thought it was all finally over and everyone, even the cops, have closed the books on us.

Of course when you kill people it’s never really over, is it?

And I killed Judi Bari in 1990 but she didn’t die until 1997.

Mike Koepf’s pal, Max Crawford, wrote a semi-famous book about all of us pretend-revolutionaries at Stanford. Crawford’s opus was called “The Bad Communist,” but that book was no novel. It was a prose documentary. Max was obviously at ground zero to have written that one because his purported novel tells in insider detail about the real life black guy who was offed up in the hills of Santa Cruz. And that poor dupe wasn’t the only person we murdered in that period, which is what happens when a bunch of college whack-offs like we were bring real life criminals into our political groups.

The pseudo-left notion at the time was that criminals — prison inmates — were the vanguard of the proletariat. Good one, Professor H. Bruce. Got any more bright ideas? The vanguard we grouped with were the vanguard of sleep-with-the-naive coeds-and-ripoff-the-rest-of-the-young-fools for their credit cards and whatever else they’ve got; that was our prison vanguard. Between the vanguard and the feds, and the attention his book attracted, Crawford got so scared he took off for Paris to hide out for a couple of years.

A month before I tried to kill Judi Bari with my car bomb, I helped Judi and Darryl Cherney with the fire bomb at LP’s office just south of Cloverdale in April of 1990. It didn’t work the way it was supposed to, unfortunately, but it did start a small fire. Judi made a sign we leaned up against a tree facing Highway 101 that said, “L-P Screws Millworkers.”

As if millworkers didn’t know that, and as if a bunch of trust fund potheads in the hills were of any use to any working person anywhere anyway. (That sign, and a bunch like it, were propped up near the door of the MEC at 106 West Standley.)

Worse than unfortunately for me, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department still has most of the apparatus from the L-P bomb. I understand that it’s been compared to the fire bombs Judi and I made in 1980 to get rid of the airstrip hangars southwest of Santa Rosa. Only one of the hangar detonators worked the way it was supposed to work; the other one didn’t go off. The cops have it, too. Signature bombs they call them. My signature. But so far they haven’t made the link to me; or if they have they aren’t saying because, well, I’ve got the feds by the short hairs.

The 1980 airstrip bomb in Santa Rosa that didn’t go off was supposed to ignite the 20,000 gallons of airplane fuel in the underground tanks outside the hangars. As it was, the kid asleep in the hangar that did explode the way it was supposed to had to run for his life. If the underground fuel had gone up that boy would have been a roasted marshmallow. Collateral damage, as they say.

Judi and I thought the explosions we’d set off at the old Santa Rosa airfield were funny, and the Press Democrat’s coverage even funnier. And we both knew the cops were way too dumb to pin it on us. Sure enough, they didn’t.

But Bob Williams was no dummy. He leased those hangars. He knew we did it but he couldn’t pin it on us. I was sure he looked forward to testifying against me as soon as the cops got around to making the DNA link. They’ve got me on the DNA, but so far so good. They haven’t subpoenaed any of us, and here we are material witnesses to big league felonies!

DNA. The FBI refused independent investigators access to original documents, but they finally returned the originals of the Lord’s Avenger Letter to the Press Democrat. Asked about it, an editor at the paper said it had been “lost,” although the paper, at the time, maintained an archival library and a full-time archivist.)

The problem I had with Judi was her big mouth. She had all this felony information on me and she just kept on bringing it up every time I talked about getting custody of the kids, she being an unfit mother and running around using dope at all hours with a bunch of degenerates like Cherney. If she talked, I’d go to the pen for a long time. But she’d go too because I had a lot of felony information on her. And I had the goods on Cherney and Pam Davis and Karen Pickett. And Utah Phillips. And Bill Simpich and Dennis Cunningham and Tony Serra and those obnoxious little pricks Ben Rosenfeld and Robert Bloom.

I’ve even got the goods on low-level folks like Gary and Betty Ball and the MEC’s landlord, John McCowen. Like I said, when I go all these people are going with me. And that’s why I haven’t gone to prison and won’t because I’m old and far, far away and, like I said, nobody cares except you, bro.

McCowen rented the MEC premises to the FBI for the Redwood Summer years, which is one big reason why I got to have my “office” there at 106 Standley, Ukiah, back when a few nuts were actually committing industrial sabotage by wrecking logging equipment, a federal crime, hence the FBI in Ukiah with their fake environment center. I even had my own key to the front door, to which I tacked one of the so-called death threats Judi used to say she was getting all the time. (She either wrote them herself or I wrote them.) And of course I wrote the Argus letter to the Ukiah cops about Judi doing her mail order marijuana business. Because I lived literally inches from her at 9691 Humphrey Lane, Redwood Valley, even after we were separated, I knew all her movements and everything she was doing; I was the only person who could effectively snitch her off. I wanted her out of my life peacefully by trying to frame her, but it didn't work and I did what I had to do.

I put that last bomb, the Judi Bari bomb -- my most famous bomb -- under the driver’s seat of her car while her car was parked in front of the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley Street in Ukiah on the north side of the Mendocino County Courthouse. I designed it so it would explode far from Ukiah. Which it did. When Judi didn’t die like she was supposed to, I had to write The Lord’s Avenger Letter saying I, Mike Sweeney, aka The Lord’s Avenger, put the bomb in her car in Willits two full days before it blew up. I had to say I put the bomb in her car in Willits because I was with Meredyth Rinehard that Tuesday night before I put the bomb in her car, and I didn't have a solid alibi for any part of the next day, Wednesday, or Wednesday night. Judi drove down to the Bay Area Wednesday afternoon with the bomb and Utah Phillips in her car. The bomb exploded just before noon on Thursday, May 20th, 1990.

She could have been in on it, but people say, Would she have been crazy enough to knowingly drive around with a bomb under her seat? Sure, if she had been assured by me that it wouldn't got off and she had no idea how it worked, and she wanted it to be found there for her own cockamamie, self-aggrandizing reasons.

But Judi survived my bomb. And I had a big prob, which made me write my hurry-up Lord’s Avenger Letter to divert attention from myself, the ex-husband, always the first looked-at perp.

Meredyth, my alibi, my girlfriend, worked for the Mendocino County Health Department and, I can tell you, she is very unhappy to be involved in any of this after all these years. But she’ll tell the truth that I was with her when the Lord’s Avenger says he was putting the bomb in Judi Bari’s car in Willits because she was with me and the Avenger both, so to speak, and so were her two kids.

Nobody was with me on Put-The-Bomb-In-Judi’s-Car Wednesday when I did what I had to do, although I’ve made the mistake of placing myself, however vaguely, in three presumably different places that day. (1) “With my kids; (2) at work; (3) at home.” I was with my kids after Judi left Redwood Valley for Ukiah. I was at work in my office at the MEC with the bomb I’d made; and after I shoved the bomb under her seat with its timer and switch on I went back home to Redwood Valley.

But nobody can place me at any of these venues when I need to be placed at them!

My co-conspirators in the cover-up for all these years got their stories ready for court. They now say Utah Phillips was playing his guitar in the doorway of the MEC the day I put the bomb in Judi’s car so he would have seen me do it. He wasn’t in the doorway. Utah and the lawyers, who I’ll take down with me when I go because they’re also in this up to their shifty, dollar sign eyebrows, were merely doing some legal site prep by placing Utah in the MEC’s doorway so he can say he never saw me there.

In living fact, Judi was showing Utah off directly across the street in front of the Courthouse at her Redwood Summer press conference. He was kind of a trophy for her because a lot of the doofuses around here thought Utah was a real deal famous person anarchist. Which is about as impressive as saying you’re the tallest guy in Philo, but there it is.

I put the bomb in Judi’s car from my office at the MEC because (1) I knew our two little girls would definitely not be in the car because they were at Meredyth’s house in Redwood Valley (2) If I put the bomb in Judi’s car out in Redwood Valley where we all lived together, the girls might have jumped in to go into Ukiah with their mother for some reason, and I didn’t want to risk the thing going off with them in the car (3) I was afraid that if I put the bomb in Judi’s car in Redwood Valley real early Wednesday morning after she and Utah and Dakota Sid and Mrs. Utah and Mrs. Sid finally fell asleep about two in the morning, the 12 hours on my timer might elapse and activate the bomb in Ukiah, thus focusing a whole lotta attention on me. (4) I had total access to Judi’s Subaru at all times, just like I had total access to her garage-house inches from the trailer where we both lived out on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley.

And my “office” was at the MEC in downtown Ukiah in McCowen’s dingy cave of a slum structure opposite the Courthouse the FBI leased from him. Nobody would suspect anything peculiar if they saw me open Judi’s car door and put something in her car. Which is what I did. I walked right out of the MEC with the thing wrapped in a towel and shoved it under Judi’s seat, having constructed it so it would be a perfectly snug fit. I snapped the On switch On, set the clock going and wished my little creation a happy trip south, far from me, the perp, the man who’s made a lot of bombs but not a single known one that worked the way it was supposed to.

But the bomb got all the way to Berkeley and Oakland without going off. Judi had gone to a meeting with Seeds of Peace (another group of lurks and murks) in Berkeley then drove to Oakland where she spent the night in the busy home of mega-creep, David Kemnitzer. All this time the bomb was silently ticking off the hours. Some time between three and four in the morning the twelve hours on the clock had elapsed and my bomb was live! All it would take now was the sudden movement of the vehicle -- a sharp turn, sudden braking, even a lane change -- to ignite it. Which is what happened only a few blocks from Kemnitzer’s house in front of Oakland High School.

I was in Ukiah and Redwood Valley when my bomb went boom. I was shocked! that Judi lived. I could be implicated! One end cap blew off slightly before the other, thus diverting a lot of the device’s power laterally instead of upwards. If it had exploded the way I built it to explode, Judi and Cherney both would have been hugging trees eternally, far, far from redwood country.

And if she and Cherney had died in the explosion I would have been home free. Everyone would have assumed she was knowingly transporting my creation and all my problems and potential problems would have been over.

But because she didn’t die my problems were just beginning, and now here I was with two big books on the case coming up and a whole lot of people already giving me the perp look, people like Steve Talbot, for instance. Talbot made a whole PBS movie implicating me in the bombing, and then he went on Belva Davis’s KQED Television Show and said Judi Bari had told him I bombed her!

And now DNA. There’s DNA on three of the letters, including the Lord’s Avenger Letter, that can be linked straight back to me. It’s just a matter of time before everything comes apart.

As soon as I heard Judi had survived my bomb, I hustled down to the Oakland hospital where, as her husband (on paper) I got to see her. She was seriously injured, and groggy from the medications, but we quickly agreed if she told the truth about the bombing, that I had done it, we would both go to prison because I would rat her out too for all the felonies we’d committed together, and we would not see our daughters grow up. We agreed to blame the cops.

I wrote the Lord’s Avenger Letter with the hurry up help from a Concordance, a fact Don Foster, the best documents analyst guy in the country, confirmed in such excruciating and truly exact detail all I can do is squirm and say, “Not me. I didn’t do it.”

The idea of the Lord’s Avenger Letter was to divert attention from me onto every other male in the Redwood Empire. I wrote it like I was a religious nut case of a logger who was particularly irate about Judi’s performance at an anti-abortion rally in Ukiah. She and Cherney had walked right into the demonstrators, many of them visibly deranged, singing “Shall The Fetus Be Aborted,” a grotesque insult and infuriating to the Christians, many of whom were brandishing those tiny plastic Mr. Peanut-like fetuses and with their hands raised to the skies, talking in tongues to the sky gods.

Their leader was a huge guy who’d been an All-Pro defensive end with the Cleveland Browns. If Mr. All-Pro had gone off there would have been some serious mayhem the length of Dora Street. Fortunately for Bari and Cherney and the rest of us, including me, Mike Sweeney, who was there taking photos for my bomb plot and for my buddies at the FBI, Mr. Staley was in direct communication with God at the time and had failed to note the pests who’d invaded his flock.

Every smart person who’s paid any attention to this case always points straight at me. I can’t keep it in Mendocino County among the dummies much longer; the world outside isn’t all KMUD and KZYX and KPFA.

But something’s up, and it looks like it’s me. The cops are sniffing around and not one cent of the $3.2 million Darryl Cherney and my two daughters “won” in that phony federal suit has been paid out. I was pretty sure I was going to get arrested. But if I go I wasn’t going alone because a lot of people have helped cover up the truth about the bombing and I’m taking them down with me. Count on that.

I had a girlfriend right away when Judi and I split the blanket or, if you prefer, tore up the Little Red Book. Her name was Meredyth Rinehard. I had her kids seal the Lord’s Avenger letter that I wrote in a big hurry and mailed to Mike Geniella at the Press Democrat as soon as I heard my bomb hadn’t killed Judi. Meredyth's kids were little. Little kids will do whatever you ask them to do, and I asked them to seal the envelope and lick the stamp on it for me. DNA was just coming in as a criminal identifier in 1990, but just in case I didn’t want my DNA on the thing. Or Judi’s DNA on it through our daughters. So I asked Meredyth’s kids to do it.

If the subpoenas go out I know Meredyth’s gonna be real quick to give me up. Pam Davis and Karen Pickett will rat me out, too, but I’ve got so much felony-quality stuff on all of them, including their crumb bum “progressive” lawyers, and even more on that idiot Cherney, and on Brannan’s Redwood Summer Justice Project Scam-a-rama, and even on Judge Wilkins — her husband was a fellow Maoist, among her many disqualifying relationships — I’ll be taking a whole lotta so-called “progressives” down with me if the feds indict me. I’m not going to jail alone. And you watch the snitch fest when the DNA subpoenas arrive at certain addresses!

Never happened, and here I am on the other side of the world living the good life for the time left to me.

How did I pull it off? Simple. I was a snitch for the FBI all the way back to Stanford. If they had moved on me for the bombing, I’d have revealed their activities in Mendocino County during the Redwood Summer period, right down to their phony enviro office at the Mendocino Environment Center across Standley Street from the County Courthouse.

So the feds gave me a free pass to murder my wife rather than have me reveal their undercover operations based in Ukiah.