The Killdozer Rampage

Marvin Heemeyer built a weapon to flatten anything that stood in his way, and the internet called him a hero.

Josie Klakström
5 min readOct 22, 2021
Deputy Glenn Trainor on top of the modified bulldozer via sofrep.com

On Friday the 4th June 2004, a man with a grudge secretly built a death machine out of a bulldozer and went on a rampage around the sleepy town of Granby. The spree lasted over two hours before finally coming to a deadly standstill.

Granby is a small town in Colorado, sitting 86 miles from Denver. Many of its residents are early pioneer settlers, and in the early 2000s, the population was at around 1,500.

Marvin Heemeyer was born in October 1951 in Castlewood, South Dakota. He moved to Granby in the early nineties and set up a car repair shop in the town. The shop was built on two acres of land, bought from the Resolution Trust Corporation, which he later agreed to sell to the Docheff family. The deal was initially for $250,000 but later rose to around $1million.

In an interview, Susie Docheff said she believed Heemeyer was just trying to cause trouble. “I just think he set things up to the point where you would have to say no. He probably set you up to say ‘no’ just so he could get mad at you.”

In 2001, the town’s zoning commission approved the construction of a Mountain Park Concrete plant. However, Heemeyer strongly…

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Josie Klakström

Josie is a freelance journo who writes about writing, true crime, culture and marketing. www.truecrimeedition.com