Woodburn Bank Bombing--Facts/Speculations

The more people and devices you plan to use in a crime, the more complex it becomes. There are plans to coordinate, stories to get straight, technology to master, and a chronology to lay out. Then, you have to try to accommodate the possibly unpredictable reaction of victims, targets or investigators of the crime. It really takes quite a bit of intelligence, planning, sobriety and care to pull off a crime that may have involved the possibility of remote detonation of a bomb [though the details on what triggered the bomb explosion in this case haven't yet been revealed; it probably was detonated by the bomb "expert"]. Those of us who haven't been much involved in crime might be well-advised to take a moment to reflect on the extent of life that has to be mastered in order to pull off a crime like the one alleged here. I know I couldn't have done it. Neither, apparently, could the perpetrators. Well, let's lay out some of the facts/chronology of it.

December 12, 2008

I begin with the date of the crime, moving backwards and forwards as seems necessary. Around 4:30 a.m. on Friday Dec. 12, from a computer whose IP address is 71.59.129.128, two cell phones were activated. Those phones (Tracfones) were purchased on Nov. 26, the day before Thanksgiving, at a Bend (OR) Wal-Mart. I have only been in Wal-Mart in the past ten years to purchase Junior Mints, because only Wal-Mart carries them in the big 12 oz. box. [Thus, whenever I indulge in this inexpensive and relatively harmless gastronomic hobby, I go to a Wal-Mart. The mints are cheaper in Salem, I have discovered, than in McMinnville, though you may not be interested in that factoid].

As we return to the narrative of the crime, I note that there were also two phone cards bought for these cell phones, but these cards were purchased at a Salem (OR) Wal-Mart on Dec. 11, the day before the crime. They were purchased at a different Wal-Mart from where I buy Junior Mints. In any case, in what is the first thing not clear to me, we are told that the Wal-Mart surveillance video (I think they surveil at Wal-Mart to make sure no one returns items to shelves without notice) picked up on a young man purchasing the two phone cards, along with some green paint, on Dec. 11 in Salem. They also have video of the Bend transaction. Here are my questions. Is there also surveillance video of bank transactions or placement of the devices, described below? Where are the video-cams at the Bend and Salem Wal-Mart (North Lancaster) stores in question? The impression I get from reading the "Probable Cause" sheet and newspaper accounts is that the surveillance video cameras at Wal-Mart were only at the check-out stand, but then the car that the purchaser drove was somehow picked up on the surveillance tape, revealing the first letter ("Q") and the last two digits ("84") of the license plate. So maybe there are also surveillance video cameras in the parking lot.

Of course, picking up a license number is possible if the purchaser merely drove his car right up to the cashier stand, though I don't think that is the tradition of shopping at Wal-Mart In addition, such an act would draw too much attention to the purchaser and would probably result in running over of the greeter. In fact, Wal-Mart greeters are more frequently trampled to death than run over, I believe.

So, those are my first two questions--what is the extent of the videos in police custody? They will have to be turned over to the defense, to be sure, and we will eventually learn about them.

Moving to the Crime

So, we know that two cell phones, with about 140 minutes placed on them after purchase of two phone cards on Dec. 11, were activated by 4:30 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 12. Janet Turnidge, the wife of Bruce, said to the police that when she awoke around 6:00 a.m. on the 12th, Bruce wasn't there. I think that an important thing the police are going to be doing this week, as well as attending their kids' Christmas pageants, is figuring out whether the computer with the IP address listed above was, in fact, owned by the Turnidge's. Oh, you might want to know, that a Dec. 16 search of the sprawling farm in SW Marion County revealed a badly charred laptop computer. Hm. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to say that you want now to see if the computer ID number can be obtained. The Probable Cause sheet doesn't say whether the computer was found in the river or in the shop or in the house; it does say that some fresh tire tracks near the river, consistent with a truck being back up to unload evidence, were found when they searched the property on that day.

Well, in any case, someone bought two phones because they had a plan in mind, even if the mind that hatched the plan was of, as my haughty professor used to say, "inferior quality." The plan appeared to be as follows. Someone would put one of the phones in a dumpster near a bank in Woodburn (in this case the Wells Fargo Bank), along with some materials/boxes, etc. that might have looked like a bomb but were, in the lingo of bomb experts, a "hoax." Then, calls would be made to two adjoining banks, with threatening and scary words so as to scare the people away from the bank/s. These calls would inform the bank personnel where the cell phone was planted. The idea seemed to be that some eager bank employee, knowing the location of the cell phone, would dash out to pick it up or wait around for instructions to follow. Our criminals were no dummies, however. They wanted to make sure no one got blown up. Thus, they placed the "fake bomb" with the cell phone in the dumpster/garbage can. That way if Teller Jessica or whoever actually fished out the cell phone (why would anyone do this?) slipped or reached in too eagerly, she wouldn't blow herself up.

But here is where we have to stop and pause and summarize where we are and see how complex crimes like this are so, so difficult to pull off. Turn to the next essay to continue our story.

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