Of Two Brothers And Murder -- Kehoes Accused In Anti-Government Campaign

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - In the years since the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building shone a spotlight on the deep-rooted coils of anti-government activism in middle America, the stories have become many: standoffs in Montana, bombings in Washington state, bank robberies in the Midwest.

Few of the stories of the underground war with the ultra-right have been as calamitous as that of the Kehoe brothers, two home-schooled boys from rural Washington who talked of building a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest and, authorities say, wound up on a nationwide rampage of murder, theft, bombings and police gunfights.

Their drama, unfolding in one of the government's most important anti-government racketeering trials in recent years, culminated recently in a federal courtroom here. Chevie Kehoe, 26, stood accused of leading a murderous campaign to create his dream of an Aryan Peoples Republic. Cheyne Kehoe, the 22-year-old brother who followed him on a 14-state odyssey of gun shows and shootouts before turning his brother in, gave testimony that could send Chevie to his execution.

This is one of the government's highest-profile attempts to bring the weight of federal anti-racketeering statutes against increasingly vocal movements advocating the causes of white separatism and anti-government militancy.

Chevie Kehoe, accused of involvement in five murders, two robberies, a kidnapping, a city hall bombing and two shootouts with police, is tied to more acts of domestic terrorism than any other right-wing extremist in the United States in the last decade, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors such crimes.

The case has drawn national attention, in part, because of the Kehoe family's connection to the Aryan Nations in Idaho and the Elohim City compound in Muldrow, Okla., where the Kehoes are said to have made contact with members of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), responsible for a string of recent bank robberies. Kehoe's father, Kirby, who pleaded guilty to racketeering charges before trial, supplied at least one of the guns used in the ARA robberies, federal sources said.

Defense lawyers, who were scheduled to commence their case today, appeared poised to throw much of the blame on the shoulders of Cheyne Kehoe, whom they suggested could be pointing blame at his brother to remove suspicion from himself. Moreover, they have scoffed at government attempts to paint the Kehoe family as serious threats.

Indeed, by the time it had rested its case last week before a jury of nine blacks and three whites, the government had sketched the Kehoes more as white-trash thugs than Aryan warriors.

"If these boys are charged with trying to overthrow the government," defense lawyer Cathleen Compton said, "we're all safe."

Mother, brother testify

Surely the number of mothers who have offered damning testimony against their sons in capital cases must be few. Yet Gloria Kehoe sat on a witness stand last week and told jurors a chilling story about the son, the eldest of eight, with whom she had always been closest.

Breaking down in tears and occasionally locking eyes with Kehoe and declaring, "I love you, Chevie," Gloria Kehoe related the details of the most serious offense with which Kehoe and co-defendant Daniel Lee are charged: barging into the home of Arkansas gun dealer Bill Mueller, handcuffing him, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter, shocking them with a stun gun, taping plastic bags over their heads and throwing their bodies in a nearby bayou.

Chevie, she said, had calmly related the details of the murders to her when she wanted to know how he acquired the $37,000 worth of guns and ammunition stolen from the Muellers, longtime family friends.

"It's got to be told, Chevie," she said. "There's wrong, and there's right. I can't live with it anymore."

Cheyne told a similar story. The younger brother is facing a 24-year sentence in Ohio for a shootout with police - sparked when Chevie feared state troopers who pulled them over knew about the Mueller murders. Cheyne was not involved in any of the killings in which he implicated his brother, authorities say.

Cheyne told jurors his brother admitted to him not only his role in the Mueller killings, but also his involvement in the murders in Washington and Idaho of two former associates, Jeremy Scott, 23, and Jon Cox, 25. The five deaths form the center of the government's seven-count indictment.

Family of drifters

The family saga is in many ways the ultimate American road trip. They bought a travel trailer and drove from Florida to Colville, Wash., park it out by a river, had some kids, moved to Arkansas for a while. Sold the trailer, bought a truck. Drove around the Midwest and made some money putting up barns. Fixed up the truck and move to Montana.

Cheyne and Chevie were both pulled out of junior high and home schooled, living in a cabin without electricity. Both boys married early. Chevie and his wife lived in a school bus and a motel room before Chevie stole a travel trailer in Arkansas and hauled it back to Washington state.

Both often wandered the West looking for work. They were good at

buying guns, cleaning them up, and selling them on the gun-show circuit.

Chevie Kehoe would often drive to the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho, where he was a devotee of Rev. Richard Butler's sermons on white supremacy.

It was after a stay there that Chevie came back to the Shadows motel in Spokane. On the morning of April 19, 1995, he woke motel manager Jeff Brown, insisting that he turn on CNN, Brown recalled.

`It's gotta be a truck bomb'

"Ten minutes later, the news is breaking there was a bomb going off in Oklahoma City," Brown said. "And he says, `It's about time.' "

Brown remembers exclaiming, "It's gotta be a car bomb!" Kehoe, he remembers, replied: "It's gotta be a truck bomb."

"I look back on it," Brown said, "and he obviously knew about it beforehand."

Federal authorities have not linked Kehoe to the Oklahoma City bombing or its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, but they have not ruled out the possibility that the two of them could have met at Elohim City.