Thanksgiving Day Terror: The Unsolved Case of the Blount Family
On Thanksgiving Day, 1985, Susan Blount awoke to screams coming from her living room. What she would find remains one of the strangest cold cases in Texas today.
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If you have information relating to what happened to the Blount Family, the Attorney General of Texas’s general line is 512-463-2100
Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.
SOURCES
24 Nov 1986, 12 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
21 Dec 2008, 7 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
Cowboy Michael Toney: The Case Story (archive.org)
16 Nov 1996, 46 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
04 Dec 1997, 37 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
28 Mar 1986, 11 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
14 May 1999, 32 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
03 Oct 2006, A7 - Fort Worth Star-Telegram at Newspapers.com
12-year probe into briefcase blast at Texas home finally yields an arrest - Deseret News
A Thanksgiving Mystery, the Blount Family Bombing : r/UnresolvedMysteries (reddit.com)
Michael Roy Toney | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers
Man convicted in Lake Worth bombing dies in crash | wfaa.com
https://www.history.com/topics/1990s/oklahoma-city-bombing
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my US listeners. I hope you’re enjoying time with your family and eating some really good food. And even if you’re international or don’t celebrate, I hope you can find a moment to think about what you’re grateful for. That’s always been my favorite part of thanksgiving, taking time to actually think about my life and how grateful I am for it. That and funeral potatoes. My aunt used to always make funeral potatoes for thanksgiving and it’s probably the one food I could eat for the rest of my life.
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Alright, I’m really eager to jump into today’s story. It’s about a Thanksgiving day bombing and the search for who was responsible. The actual event itself is wild, but the turn it takes when police are hunting down who did it is also unlike anything I’ve read before.
Our story starts on November 28th, 1985. Just outside of Fort Worth Texas, in a small mobile home community on the edge of Lake Worth. That day, the Blount family gathered in their new mobile home to celebrate Thanksgiving.
The Blount’s didn’t have much money, if you asked Susan, the mom about it, she’d tell you that they were “the brokest people in the world”. Earlier that year, they had to move from the Seattle area down to Texas to help her husband Joe’s father. And They were really limited on what they could get because of their finances, but they needed to find somewhere where their two teenage kids, Angela and Robert could go to a “decent” high school. So they settled into the Hilltop Mobile Home Park.
And that thanksgiving, actually, they didn’t have a phone line. Susan had to stop paying the bill and the phone company shut it off. They didn’t even really have enough furniture to have Joe’s brother and nephew over that day. Joe had to go to the shop where he was a mechanic to borrow some chairs.
But a makeshift thanksgiving is still a thanksgiving, and as long as they had each other, that’s all they needed. And this thanksgiving marked a good new era for the Blount family. Joe’s brother Ray was there with his son Michael, and the two had actually been estranged for years. But Michael had flown in from Tulsa, and Here they were breaking bread together. it felt like a step in the right direction of repairing their relationship.
Joe, the father, also had a lot to be grateful for. He had struggled with alcohol a lot in the last few years and it was making it hard for him to hold down a job. But he recently had gotten a job as a mechanic nearby and was feeling really fulfilled by his work. He told his wife susan he “‘wanted to work with those guys for the rest of his life.”
This took a huge weight off Susan’s shoulders. She had been keeping the family afloat with her job at an insurance agency. And while she couldn’t pay the phone bill, she paid their rent, on time, every month.
But, back to that day. The family had an early dinner, and then around 5pm Ray went home. He felt really good about how the day went with his son, and apparently Michael felt the same way. He called his mother afterwards to tell her about how well it went.
Then, at 9pm Joe, Angela, Robert and Michael decided they wanted to go to a convenience store and grab some more snacks. And joe wanted to get a little more beer. Susan was way too tired after cooking for everyone that day, so she told them they can go ahead without her, she’s going to go lay down in her room for a bit.
Joe jumps in the car with his kids and nephew, and they drive off. As the car peels away, Susan can hear the sound from her bed of the unpaved gravel driveway crunching beneath the tires.
She hasn’t fallen asleep yet, and for a little while, she’s kind of in and out of sleep. She falls asleep for a bit, but then she’s awoken when she hears the tires on gravel again and she perks up a little in anticipation of her family being home.
There’s a knock at the front door.(SFX) Joe took the car, he should have his keys to get in, so susan doesn’t get out of bed. If she hears banging on the door she’ll come help. But there’s no more knocking. She listens, expecting someone to come through the front door, but instead, all she hears is that sound again, the crunch of the gravel under tires as whoever came up to her door drives off. (SFX)
Must have been the wrong home, she thinks. And with that thought, she drifts back off to sleep.
The next sound that Susan hears is screaming. Deep, guttural screams coming from the living room. She’s ripped from her sleep, what the hell is going on?! Susan runs to open her bedroom door, and she could have never expected what she saw.
Right on the other side of the door, were flames. (SFX) It looked like her entire home was on fire. And in the middle of the living room, sitting in the same chair he had thanksgiving in, was Joe, fully engulfed in the fire
Susan’s memory is shoddy from this moment on, but somehow she ends up outside of the trailer in her front yard, where she sees Robert, her 14 year old son, laying in the gravel. The front door of their home had been blown off the hinges and laid beside him. Through the open front door, all she can see are flames, now taking over the entire foundation of the mobile home. If her family is inside, she can’t see them. She can’t even hear them over the roar of the fire anymore.
Robert’s not responding, he wasn’t even moving. From the looks of it, his face and hand are burned BADLY, and his shoes look like they’ve melted into his feet.
The rest of this moment comes in flashes. As any mother’s worst nightmare unfolds around her, Susan catches a glimpse of her neighbor James running over to help, then there’s a moment in her memory of James being treated by an EMT, oxygen being held up to his face. There’s a small flash of Robert inside of an ambulance. Is she crazy or did she just see his arms move? After a moment he seemed to be coughing, choking back up some of the black smoke he inhaled.
Susan is taken to the hospital in the ambulance with her son, and as she’s being taken away firefighters are super soaking the trailer. The angry flames are being replaced by billowy smoke, and soon, the smoke dies down as well. All that is left of the mobile home is its charred skeleton.
We’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to look into what it was that caused the fire.
At this point, Susan is in the hospital with Robert and has no idea what caused the fire in her home or what happened to her family. She saw her husband Joe on fire in the living room. But what about Angela? What about Michael?
Well, reporters from the Fort Worth Star Telegram were on the scene right on the heels of emergency services, and they started interviewing neighbors who witnessed the events.
Tim Tortella was a 29 year old neighbor of the Blount’s who was watching Tv in his trailer when he heard what sounded like an explosion. He said “it sounded like a stick of dynamite going off. It shook my house when it went off”
Tim didn’t miss a beat, he grabbed his brother Shawn right when he heard the blast and together they scaled the fence separating his home and the Blounts. Shawn stayed on the lawn with Robert, trying to tend to his burns, but Tim saw the flames coming out from the windows and knew he had to do something. He tried to run in, but could only make it halfway down the hall towards the living space before the smoke and heat became too much.
She doesn’t remember it, but it was Susan that told Tim her family was still inside in the living area.
Another neighbor named Aline Bruce was about 50 yards away and described hearing a similar explosion. Reporters got to her while she was standing outside, watching the plumes of smoke rise from the Blount’s home. She told them that the blast was so loud, she thought something had exploded in her own home.
Again, Susan doesn’t remember this, but there were multiple neighbors who ran over to help. Elton Walls was woken from sleeping by the blast, and he put on his shoes and ran over with his fire extinguisher before he even knew what was going on. The community didn’t have many resources, but the firemen said that as they arrived, multiple neighbors were trying to put out the fire with their garden hoses.
As for the family inside, it just wasn’t enough. A fire that strong and a blast of that magnitude probably killed everyone instantly, a firefighter told the Fort Worth Star Telegram. It seemed like Robert had been standing perfectly so the blast pummeled him out of the door which was the only reason he survived.
But none of that answered the burning question. What caused the blast?! And while doctors, police, and Susan were waiting for Robert to regain consciousness so they could ask him what happened, investigators started to search the remains of the home for any clues. They do this, however, with an eye towards susan. It did seem suspicious that her whole family was killed or gravely injured and she seemed to escape untouched.
It seems, at first, like it may have been the furnace in the home, which was located inside the trailer underneath the living room area where the family would have been sitting. Is there a chance something went wrong and the whole place blew up?
But one of the investigators sees something that definitely doesn’t look right. among the ashes of few pieces of furniture the Blounts owned were some scraps of something that looked out of place. He calls back to the police station and says someone needs to question Robert, now.
It’s around this time that Robert starts waking up in the hospital. And before he can really get his head wrapped around what happened- They need him to remember as much as he can leading up to the blast. And that’s when Robert confirms their fears about what they found in the house.
According to Robert, that night, he got in the car with his family and they made a quick trip to the convenience store to grab snacks and beer. When they arrived back home, Angela noticed that on the steps leading up to their mobile home was a briefcase.
She bent down and picked it up, giggling as she inspected it. Ooo what did they think was in it? They all joked and gave answers, angela imaged that it was filled with some sort of untold treasure. She brought it inside so they could all open it together.
Only, when they all gathered around, angela clicked open the latches of the briefcase. Robert remembered the sound. It sounded heavier and more biting than just a latch, it sounded like a mouse trap. (SFX echoey) Next thing he knew his body was hurling backwards out the door.
The investigators all looked at each other. They had heard stories like this before. What angela picked up off of her porch wasn’t just a briefcase. It was a bomb.
The FBI got involved in the investigation and were able to reconstruct the explosive device. There was a mousetrap inside. Opening the briefcase triggered the mousetrap, which triggered the bomb that was made out of materials that included “two galvanized metal pipes filled with smokeless gunpowder and a 9 volt battery.” I was going to read off the entire contents of the bomb I really don’t want to give the FBI more of a reason to look into me.
So the police had the how, but what they needed was the who and why? Still, they were looking at Susan, had she placed the bomb on the porch before heading off to sleep?
One of the detectives asked Susan if she had ever taken insurance policies out on her family, to which she responded, “yes”. And as she tells him she had, she can see the look in his eyes change. He gets this kind of Gotcha look on his face, like the insurance policy was the missing piece that was going to tie this whole thing up. He asked her how much they were for.
Remember, the Blounts were poor. Somehow the detective must have forgotten that when asking about the insurance policies, but it was not like Susan could have taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars on her husband and kids. Ultimately, she had a $2,000 policy on her husband, and a $1,000 policy on her daughter. After that, the police stopped looking at her as a suspect.
But then she remembered the car. Remember, when Susan laid down to fall asleep, she heard the sound of a car pulling up and driving off, and someone had knocked on her door. That must have been the person that left the briefcase on her porch.
susan never got up. though. She didn’t see who was at the door or even what car they were driving, she only heard the sound. So police start asking neighbors if they saw anything that night.
And thankfully, one neighbor did. As he was pulling into his driveway, he remembered seeing a Red, late model station wagon pulling away from the Blount residence. He also said that he remembered seeing that car around the neighborhood before.
It feels promising, but authorities aren’t able to locate the car. They’re not able to do anything, really, at least, that’s what they tell Susan and Robert. That December, Robert lay in a hospital bed getting skin grafts to heal his burns and waiting for any news of who did this to his family. They had no enemies. They had only lived in this specific trailer park for 2 months, they hardly knew anyone. Why would anyone want to do this to them?
The police were asking the same exact question, and at first, the only person they could think of was Matthew Huff.
Immediately after the bombing, rumors started spreading around Azle high school where Angela went. There, a 15-year old boy named Matthew Huff had a crush on Angela. He had asked her out only to be rejected. Sure, that happens to lots of high school kids. But Matthew had a particular darkness to him that the other kids had picked up on.
Right after the bombing, Matthew started telling other students that he had at one point built a bomb. He didn’t say that he had built this particular bomb, but just that he had built A bomb before.
When other kids started saying that Matthew had bombed the Blounts, he never corrected anyone. And actually, a little while after the bombing, Matthew was sent to a Juvenile correctional facility. Everyone assumed it was because he had killed the blounts
But in fact, it was for burglary. And when police questioned Matthew, he said that he just wanted to seem tough to his classmates, so he let them believe that he had built the bomb. The police kept him on the suspect list, but there wasn’t enough evidence that he had really done anything.
Then, a few months later, in early 1986, the ATF was running a sting on a man they thought was illegally selling firearms in Azle texas. The man was named Douglas Brown, and he was a business owner in town who had a license to sell firearms, but not automatic weapons and explosives, which they had received a tip he was selling. Oh, and drugs. He was also selling drugs out of his office. Which, my family near Azle informed me was not very shocking in the 80’s.
On March 5th of 1986, an undercover ATF agent met Brown at a restaurant in Azle where she asked if she could buy an explosive from him. Brown responded that he could build her a bomb.
The two met at a mall a few weeks later where Brown presented her with….a briefcase. He opened it and showed her the contents; a white, putty like substance wrapped in a green colored substance which he said was a homemade plastic explosive, all wrapped in napalm. It also contained electronic circuits and a place to put a blasting cap to detonate the bomb. I looked into the contents of douglas’s bomb a bunch, and i could tell you what it was made of but i wont because FBI, but I will say in everything i read about it There was no mention of a mousetrap detonator.
Brown was immediately arrested and brought down to the police station where he was questioned if he knew anything about the Blount family. He didn’t, and police were never able to find any connection between him and the Blounts. BUT he was kept on the suspect list. Even if he didn’t place the bomb, perhaps he had sold it to the person who did.
After these two suspects were investigated, the case started cooling off. There just weren’t other suspects at the time to look into. That December, a tip line was set up for any information the public had on the case. No one called. The police said that had never happened before. It was so strange that there was a briefcase bomb, which insinuated some sort of organization or skill, this was not just some pipe bomb a high schooler could build, and no leads. At this point, they didn’t even know if it was targeted! Was someone really trying to kill the blounts, or was it placed on the wrong porch. For how helpful the neighbors seemed to be initially, there was also a seedy underbelly to the community. Drug dealers. Meth makers, maybe the bomb was intended for one of them.
We’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to talk about the event that opened the case back up.
On April 19th, 1995, 10 years after the Blount’s were bombed in their home on Thanksgiving, a gawky young man drives a Ryder rental truck full of homemade explosives to the front of a federal building in Oklahoma city. The man is 26, though he presents as much younger, and is waging an imaginary war with the government in his mind. This, he thinks, is the way to win. At 9:00am, the truck detonates, killing 168 people inside of the building, 19 of them children.
The Oklahoma city bombing remains the worst act of domestic terrorism committed on American soil.
One of the immediate after effects of this tragedy, was it caused a surge of financing to flow into the ATF, to make sure a bombing of this magnitude never happened again.
And with all this extra money, the bureau had the resources to look into some unsolved bombings. So the Blount family tragedy, which at the time was the biggest unsolved bombing in america, was reopened. as the ATF starts re looking into how this could have happened, they get a tip.
In the summer of 1997, a man by the name of Jack Ferris asked to speak to police. He’s been sitting a half an hour from Lake Worth in Parker County Jail for some time, but he tells police he might have some information they want. That is, if they’re willing to set him free for it.
Police are skeptical, but they take the meeting. They’ve heard a lot of tall tales and confessions from prisoners looking for commuted sentences, many of them false.
But Ferris tells them he’s been having conversations with another inmate who confessed to something pretty disturbing. This prisoner told Ferris that he was the one responsible for the Blount family bombing.
Ferris gets released. His bargaining tactic was successful, and a man named Michael Toney starts being seriously investigated.
Toney was 31 years old at the time, and had grown up in Cottonwood, California, a few miles north of sacramento. To say Toney’s childhood was tough would be an understatement. His father had walked out on the family when Toney was young, and what followed was a series of terrible and often abusive boyfriends his mother brought home. Toney’s once recounted the time when his mothers boyfriend tied him to a chair lit his hands on fire by spraying lighter fluid on them and sparking them with a lighter. He did this over and over for his own sick enjoyment. Toney was about 10 at the time of the event.
Then, when Toney was just a preteen, one of his best friends, Annette Selix, was killed by a serial killer targeting young women in Cottonwood. Darrell Keith Rich was eventually caught and executed for the murders of four young girls in the area.
In 1990, his aunt was sexually assaulted and murdered. Her killer was also given the death sentence for his crime.
After years of heart break, grief, and abuse, Toney decided to leave Cottonwood for Texas before he even made it to the 10th grade. He dropped out of high school and never looked back.
By 1997 when he was being investigated for the Blount family bombings, he was already in jail for theft while on parole.
Police were able to track down a woman named Kimberly who was married to Toney from 1986-1989. She was with him the night of Thanksgiving, 1985, and remembers what Toney was doing that night very well.
She said on thanksgiving , he had been trying to exclude her from his plans, but she convinced him to let her tag along. He was going fishing with his best friend, Chris Meeks.
Kimberly told police that on the way to the Fort Worth Nature Center, Toney stopped by a business near the Hilltop Mobile Home park where the Blounts lived. She saw him take a briefcase out of the car and bring it into the business. Just a few minutes later, he returned with no briefcase.
Kimberly remembered a lot of details about being at the nature center, like the gun that Toney used when he shot and killed a beaver. But even though they were in close proximity to the Hilltop Mobile home park, she never remembered the sound of an explosion
Chris Meeks, the best friend who also attended the fishing trip was also questioned by police, and he tells them that Toney told him he needed to “fulfill a contract” and that he had seen a briefcase on him that day.
Michael Toney was arrested, and in May 1999 his trial began. Both Kimberly and Chris were brought in to testify
Chris revealed that on top of seeing the briefcase, Toney told him he needed Chris to help him with “a mission”. They all drove to the business near the Hilltop Mobile home park, and Toney sent Chris out to go through some bushes in the area where he could see the mobile home park on the other side. Chris wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to be looking for, but he reported back to Toney that it looked like no one was home in one of the trailers on the end. That’s when Toney got out of the car with the briefcase and was gone for a few minutes.
When he got back, Chris said he was almost giddy. He told Kimberly and chris that he had fulfilled the contract, and then they went fishing at the Nature center.
He testified that weeks before the bombing, he knew that Toney was hanging out with some guys that spoke Tongan, one who went by the name Larry. About a week before the bombing Chris overheard a conversation between Larry and Toney, in which the words “bombing” and “contract” were mentioned. He didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. Days later, Toney showed him a briefcase and said he needed to “blow something up”
Ok, I’m going to call this part out, because if you felt like something was missing in the case against Toney up until this point, you’d be right. There was no why. There was just a ‘mysterious contract’. The next witness to testify added a lot more color to the deal Toney had set up.
So Surprisingly, the inmate who gave police the original tip on Toney, wasn’t the only cellmate to testify. Another cellmate of Toney’s, Finis Blankenship, also took the stand and said Toney told him he was being paid $5000 for the job. $2500 to make the bomb, and $2500 to place it. He also said that this was a drug related hit, but the briefcase was put on the wrong doorstep
This testimony conveniently answered the question of why but this is also the point where the case against Toney starts to fall apart. Blankenship was a serial informer who would drum up information to give to police to commute his sentences. Sentences he got for being a pedophile, mind you. So now, the only case for why Toney would have done this is coming from someone we don’t know we can trust.
And on top of that, would you believe, that months before the trial started, Jack Ferris, the initial informant who tipped off police to Toney, redacted his statement.
On a cold winter day, Jack Ferris went back to the police and told them he had fabricated the story with Toney. He had been given permission by Toney to accuse him of the bombing in order to get out of prison faster.
Toney also took the stand in his own defense and admitted to telling Jack he could blame the bombing on him to get out of jail earlier. He had learned about the bombing from a man named Bennie Joe Toole, who was friends with Michael Huff, remember the suspect who liked Angela but she didn’t like him back? Huff had told Bennie a lot of specific details about the bombing that then made their way to Toney.
What about Toney’s ex wife? She was with him that day. She saw him get out of the car with a briefcase and come back without it. That seems pretty damning.
Well, when she told thatf story to police, that wasn’t the first time the police had questioned her. The first time she spoke to the police, she admitted to them she had never heard of the bombing. She later admitted to going to the library to research the case. It was only after she had learned about it that she and Chris Meeks went back to the police with their story.
But none of that seemed to matter. During the trial, Jack Ferris’s redaction wasn’t brought up, Kim didn’t change her accusations, and the prosecution went hard against Toney. They brought 80 pieces of evidence collected at the scene of the explosion to show the Jury just how violent the blast was. They brought up every piece of Toney’s past that they could. That he was a thief. That he was violent against his ex wife and former girlfriends. That one time he forced an ex-girlfriend to play Russian roulette (she survived). His lawyers insisted that none of that made him a bomber.
On may 25th, however, just 15 days after the trial had started, Michael Toney was sentenced to death for the Thanksgiving bombing of the blount family. It took the Jury 4 hours to find him guilty.
For those familiar with the case, the news seemed shocking. There was no physical evidence that put Toney at the scene at the time of the bombing. And witness accounts had largely been redacted.
The surviving Blount family members, however, seemed relieved. Susan came forward and said that she knew, without a doubt, that they had charged the right man. Lynne Blount, the mother of Michael, the cousin who died in the blast, said she knew he was guilty 100%.
But the more Toney’s defense attorneys looked into the case, the more they were able to pull his conviction apart.
They looked into the gun that Kimberly remembered Toney using to kill the beaver the day of the bombing, and they were able to find out that Toney didn’t buy that gun until December. He couldn’t have used it the day of the bombing.
Kimberly and Chris had also said they had been driven around in Toney’s pickup truck. But the truck also wasn’t bought until December. If they did take this fishing trip, it didn’t happen on Thanksgiving.
There was also the way that some of this witness testimony was collected. A cognitive interview specialist was brought in to collect the testimonies, and the defense believed that this person shaped and cajoled what the witnesses remembered. For instance, it wasn’t until Kimberly sat with the cognitive interview specialist that she remembered Toney’s involvement. The fact that she didn’t know anything about the bombing the first time police spoke to her was completely omitted from the trial.
The defense was also able to find the man who spoke Tongan and went by Larry. His real name was Tisileli Lupeheke, and he was 17 years old at the time. It turns out, he was questioned by police after the bombing, and was cleared by a polygraph test of any involvement in the case. This piece of evidence, also did not get shown to the Jury.
While the defense was trying to put together enough information to have the life sentence dropped, Toney was causing a ruckus while sitting on death row. In May of 2000 he tried selling tickets to his execution to bidders on ebay. However, the listing was up for just 4 hours before it was removed. No one had made any bids. This was not a good look for getting him released.
But in October of 2008, 9 years after he was sentenced to death, The state of texas was presented with the 14 pieces of evidence that were withheld during the first trial, and Toney’s conviction was overturned. He was released from prison on September 2nd, 2009
It was a bittersweet moment. The defense believed that they just saved an innocent man from being another casualty of the Blount family bombing, but the surviving Blount’s were devastated. The felt like they were on the path to justice for Joe, Angela, and Michael. And now, they felt further away than ever.
This story doesn’t have a happy ending. And Even though Toney was released, one month after he was set free he was killed in a car accident. This happened as the state was deciding whether or not to retry him for the crime
As of today, the case remains unsolved, though investigators do believe that it was a targeted attack, probably related to drug activity that was happening in the mobile home community, that accidentally landed on the Blount’s porch.
But there’s still questions I’d like to have answered. If the red car seen pulling out of the Blount’s driveway was seen multiple times in the community before, how did the drive not know which house their target was in? Why wasn’t the car ever located when there’s such a specific description of it? And was the bomb made by the man who was arrested earlier for giving a bomb to an undercover agent?
The case is now completely cold and it seems like it’s not under the jurisdiction of anyone after the Tarrant County police department recused themselves. It seems to now sit on the Attorney General of Texas’s shelf. If you have any information on what happened Thanksgiving Day, 1985 to the Blount Family, I’ll include information in the shownotes on how to get in touch with the Attorney General of Texas.
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