GORDON KAHL

AMBUSH AND MURDER OF GORDON KAHL


On February 13, 1983, former oft-decorated, WWII tail-gunner and tax patriot Gordon Kahl of North Dakota was targeted for death by U. S. Marshals in North Dakota. At a roadside ambush, Gordon's 23-year-old son, Yorie, was shot twice before Gordon killed two marshals and wounded several more. Miraculously, he escaped for nearly four months when a tipster once again set him up for murder in northern Arkansas. This time Kahl was shot in the back of the head execution style. An hour later, believing they had mistakenly killed a Kahl lookalike, FBI agents ordered the torching of the farmhouse where Kahl's body lay, and five gallons of gasoline were poured down the chimney and ignited, in an attempt to cover-up their purported mistake. Only hours after slipping through the dragnet and knowing full well that the media would distort the story in favor of the marshals, Gordon sat down in a motel room somewhere between North Dakota and Arkansas and told his side of the story. What follows are Kahl's words in a condensed version. The accuracy of his story was confirmed three years ago with the publication of It's All About Power, by two police officers who were on the scene with the marshals.


GORDON KAHL'S REPORT
Little-Known Affidavit Hidden in Ginter's
Chicken House Wall for Five Years
by Pat Shannan

At age 63, Gordon Kahl knew that he was a marked man. Former U. S. Marshal Bud Warren as much as told him so, after Warren had stepped down and an overzealous Ken Muir became Chief Marshal of the Fargo office. Muir and Deputy Marshals Robert Cheshire, James Hopson, and Carl Wigglesworth went gunning for Kahl on Sunday afternoon, February 13, 1983. Warren was invited to join them and impolitely refused. They had also organized several city and county officers to participate in the "capture" of Kahl. Of these, Medina Police Chief Darrell Graf not only refused to be involved but also angrily chased the feds away from the first roadblock they had foolishly set up within the city limits -- right in front of a trailer park.

Contrary to distorted news reports and a TV movie, Gordon Kahl was not a violent member of a government-hating tax group. The WWII recipient of a Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts was actually a mild-mannered, God-fearing, freedom-loving, salt-of-the-earth father of six children who eked out a living from the North Dakota soil until the banks began to confiscate the farms in the 1980s. The weekly meetings at Dr. Clarence Martin's clinic in Medina were about lawfully stopping the farm foreclosures throughout the Midwest.

(Forty years earlier in WWII, Gordon had fought side-by-side with a Sgt. Yorie, his close friend who was killed in action. Gordon had vowed to name his first son after him. After siring four daughters, Gordon was proud to see Joan deliver their first son in 1959.)

Against the advice of Warren, Muir was determined to grab some headlines. He did so but never lived to see them.

Gordon out shot the marshals and officers killing Muir and Cheshire and wounding Hopson, Graf's deputy Steve Schnabel, and County Deputy Brad Kapp. His 23-year-old son, Yorie, wounded and near death, and friend Scott Faul, 29, received double life sentences for the marshal's deaths.

From his own handwriting, we are able to learn --nearly twenty years after his murder -- the first-hand facts from Gordon Kahl's terrible experience and eventual death.

On the back of a torn shopping bag, he compiled the first record only hours after the incident. While still hiding in a barn with Scott Faul and planning what avenue of escape to take next, Gordon knew from experience that the truth would be distorted by those in charge of the "news" and began with ". . . I wish to put down on paper a record of the events which have just taken place, so that the world will know what happened."

However, the lengthy piece, which surely required at least both sides of a torn shopping bag to complete, was published by only a few "patriot" newsletters at the time and was never made known by the national media, although several copies were delivered. This was neither the first nor the last attempt by the managed news to bias the public in favor of the government's actions.

Gordon went on to tell the facts of the previous warning signs of an attack on his person, the marshal's set-up, the roadblock ambuscade, the cursing threats issued by his assailants for several minutes, the eventual shoot-out provoked by the shot that felled his son, his visit to the clinic in the aftermath, and his escape from the area. It would have been a bonanza at the time for any honest news reporter.

Later, while hiding in Arkansas at the home of Leonard and Norma Ginter, only days before he was murdered, Gordon gave a more-detailed sworn affidavit to Mr. Ginter, explaining the shoot-out and his escape from North Dakota in fear for his life. Mr. Ginter hid this and other documents in a plastic bag inside the wall of his chicken house, which went unharmed by the law officers when they torched his house following the Kahl murder. (These displays of outrageous judicial behavior will be covered in future segments. Ginter, having served most of a five year sentence in federal prison for "harboring a fugitive," retrieved the hidden documents after his release in 1987.)

Kahl's 1983 Affidavit

While not paranoid, Gordon Kahl had ample reason to fear and beware of federal agents. His affidavit attests to two previous attempts on his life at the hands of the U. S. Government. The first was after he had been railroaded into jail, following a conviction in a 1977 tax trial for which he was never indicted. He believed that while he was in perfect health, two separate heart attacks were induced in a matter of days, and had he not been released on bail pending his appeal, he would have died in the Midland, Texas jailhouse.

According to Kahl's affidavit, his friend and co-defendant, W. M. Rinehart, "was sent to Stafford, Arizona, and . . . had a heart attack, from which he died, after laying on the floor for 4 days, while his servants [jailers] refused to help him."

Another incident occurred in North Dakota on his farm on Labor Day Weekend in 1981. Gordon and his 20-year-old son, Fred, crashed on take-off in their single-engine airplane when a strange gas was released into the cockpit, incapacitating both men, shortly after they were airborne. Gordon was barely able to maintain a semi-conscious state long enough to get the plane back down. Gordon suffered facial cuts when his head hit the instrument panel. Fred was unscathed.

They soon discovered that the plane had been rigged so that when the pilot pulled the flap control handle, the engine slowed drastically and the drug was released. However, before he could show the evidence to the local authorities: [While we were gone], "a neighbor saw two men in a government car go into our place. The cowling was removed from the plane, and whatever device they had attached to the plane was removed. The cowling was left off, and we have never found out who the men were. . . we had heard many times that gov't agents had been seen around our place."

Gordon detailed the facts of the shootout and even included a crudely drawn diagram of the marshal's GMC Blazer, showing his line of fire at the time he killed the marshals [Ken Muir and Robert Cheshire], whose names he never knew. He further asserted, as did all of the defendants at trial, that ". . . we did not fire on them [first] but two of them fired on my son, Yorie. One [shooter used] a shotgun loaded with buckshot and the other [shot] was from a rifle or pistol, the bullet striking the grip on his .45 auto, which he had in a shoulder holster." (At trial the lawmen claimed they did not fire first. It has remained in dispute.)

Scott Faul had already run with his rifle to take cover behind a mobile home across the road. When he saw his young friend down, he bravely ran back into the melee to tend to him. Gordon saw the marshals outside the Blazer attempt to shoot Scott in the back and repeatedly drove them back into cover behind the truck doors with several incidents of rapid fire, finally subduing them with hits.

By this time, County Deputy Brad Kapp, who had blasted Yorie with the buckshot, realized that he had lost his trigger finger to one of Gordon's well-placed .223 slugs, dropped his shotgun, and began running back toward town.

Gordon ran from place to place to be sure that the other assailants were out of commission, saying, "I went another stop or two, and at this time the Medina Police Chief stood up and began to aim at Scotty, but when he saw me he ducked down behind his car, before I could shoot. I saw his feet or legs under his car and fired a shot at him and heard him yell and knew I'd hit him."

Gordon is mistaken here and apparently meshed two incidents into one. The police chief was Darrell Graf, 27, who had prudently stayed a furlong away with the fire truck and ambulance. Gordon was actually dealing with Steve Schnabel, one of Graf's young deputies. However, Schnabel, 22, says that he was prostrate after taking that shot in the leg from underneath the car and never aimed at Faul; that it was he who made the plea to Gordon that follows and that Gordon could have executed him but did not.

( Chief Graf's refusal to participate in the federal folly would cost him his job, even though his pre-assessment of Muir's ambush plan was accurate: "The feds would set up a roadblock, and Kahl would get out of his car with his weapon. . . and Kahl would be dead. I wanted no part of this! Kahl was not a bank robber or violent criminal but had only a minor problem with the government. I could imagine this 5'7", 160 pound, 63-year-old farmer lying dead on the road, with all these heroes celebrating their victory - then they go back to their jobs far from Medina, leaving local law enforcement to bear the brunt of a farmer killing. I almost threw up!")

Gordon then ran to the east ditch where he had previously shot Deputy Marshal James Hopson. "He saw me coming and lifted his head and said, `Don't shoot me again! I'm all done.' I took his shotgun out of his hand and his pistol out of his holster and threw them both up onto the edge of the road where he couldn't reach them and shoot me in the back." According to Yorie and Joan Kahl, Hopson became one of the government's primary distorters of truth at trial.

Gordon emphatically stated that his wife, Joan, had nothing to do with any of it and was only along to visit some other ladies in town. (The evidence showed she spent the duration of the confrontation on the floorboard of the car, but she was indicted for murder and spent three months in jail before her acquittal.)

He further wrote, "As far as I know, neither Yorie nor Scotty fired . . . Vernon Wegner wasn't armed, and although Dave Brower had his shotgun in the car, he never touched it."

Gordon and Scott loaded the badly wounded Yorie into Schnabel's Mercury and delivered him to Doc Martin's clinic. Then they headed for the Kahl farm to change cars. The ambulance arrived at the clinic with the wounded marshals, and all of the wounded were taken to the hospital in Jamestown.

The next morning, Gordon, in his wife's '63 Rambler, began the lonely trek toward Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he would hook up with like-minded people empathetic to his situation. Scott Faul, perhaps out of fear of endangering his wife and five small children, never went home. He walked to a neighbor's house to get a ride to the sheriff's office and turned himself in to authorities later that day. This Valentine's Day, he and Yorie will have been incarcerated for twenty years. Both were denied paroles in recent months.

Those wishing to write to Scott Faul or Yorie Kahl may do so at: Scott Faul 04564-059 Yorie Kahl 04565-059 POBox 1000 POBox 1000 Oxford, Wisconsin 53952 Leavenworth, Kansas 66048-1000

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