At first, the detective thought the bag sitting outside the Nederland, Colo., police station was a piece of lost property that someone hoped to reunite with its owner. So he carried it inside.
But when he grew curious later that morning and glanced into the bag, the detective saw a cellphone with wires connected to a battery, along with a suspicious powder.
Recognizing the remote-controlled bomb for what it was, the detective “carefully brought the device back outside,” court documents say. Then he rushed to evacuate the police department, a neighboring grocery store and the motel across the street.
Investigators later found that someone had called the phone connected to the device several times, unsuccessfully trying to make it explode.
After the bomb was dismantled, local police and federal investigators turned to their most pressing questions: Who would want to bomb the five-member police department in a hippie enclave in the Colorado mountains? And why?
The investigation, court documents say, led them to 64-year-old David Michael Ansberry, a 3-foot-6 man with dwarfism and a spinal deformity, who one former law enforcement official says may have been nursing a decades-old grudge against that police department.
The first step for investigators on Oct. 11 was exploring the unexploded bomb. It was connected to an AT&T prepaid phone.
The phone and the number of another prepaid phone that had called it were traced to two Colorado grocery stores – one in Longmont, another in Denver.
Surveillance video recovered from the stores gave investigators their first glimpse of the suspect.
“Each purchase was conducted by a short male (later learned to be 3’6″), who had a ponytail, wore a baseball hat and was using crutches,” court documents said.
The man paid in cash.
Ansberry, of San Rafael, Calif., was arrested over the weekend in Chicago, where investigators say he fled after the failed bombing.
Investigators have not indicated a motive, but the suspect may have been holding a grudge against local police for 45 years.
The former Boulder County sheriff, George Epp, told The Washington Post that a friend of Ansberry’s was fatally shot by an officer in 1971.
Ansberry and the dead man were part of a hippie collective called the STP Family, whose 30 members flitted between Nederland and nearby Boulder, Epp said.
STP was an acronym for Serenity, Tranquility, Peace – but mostly the group got drunk at local bars, according to Epp.
They caused trouble, but weren’t violent.
In 1971, STP member Guy Goughnor, who went by “Deputy Dog,” was arrested after drunkenly disturbing the peace at a local bar.
“And that was the last anybody ever saw him alive,” Epp said. “A little more than a month later, his body was found two counties over to the south, in an old mine dump.”
Initially, no one was charged in the killing, Epp said, although many suspected Goughnor had been shot by town marshal, Renner Forbes, a one-man police department with a reputation for being heavy-handed.
Goughnor’s death riled the other members of STP, including a 3-foot-6 man who walked with crutches, Epp said. The STP Family called him “Midget Jesse,” but his given name was David Ansberry.
Goughnor’s death remained unsolved for a quarter-century. Epp was elected sheriff in 1992 and decided to reopen the case a few years later. The lead suspect, Forbes, was by then dying in an assisted-living facility, so Epp sent a detective there.
The former marshal “confessed to the killing right there in the nursing home,” Epp said.
Forbes struck a plea deal and was sentenced to probation for manslaughter and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home.
The FBI and the Nederland Police Department would not release details about any connection between the bomb scare and the 1971 case, saying the investigation is ongoing.
The bomb scare rattled small-town Nederland. The Associated Press reported that residents were “baffled by Ansberry’s presence in their community, an artists’ refuge which has long thrived on its embrace of outsiders.”
“The community knows there has been an arrest, and that goes to calming people’s fears,” Alisha Reis, administrator for the town, told the AP. “But folks are still confused as to why it occurred. Who is this person? And why would he have done it here?”
According to the wire service: “Ansberry said he was in town to visit an old friend who was a professor but did not elaborate, said J.P. Farrell, a front desk agent at The Boulder Creek Lodge. Ansberry stayed at the hotel, which is within sight of the police station, for about two weeks, then left and returned, Farrell told The Associated Press, describing him as a pleasant guest.”
He has been charged with attempted destruction of a building or property by means of fire or explosive, according to the Justice Department. If convicted, he faces between five and 20 years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000.
After making an initial court appearance in Chicago, Ansberry is returning to Colorado, where he will stand trial.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
