It’s fake news to say that Heemeyer easement was taken or lost

Fake news has become a key part of many people’s opinions about Marv Heemeyer’s Killdozer rampage.

I know because I’ve seen it happen three times in the last week.

There I am, selling my book KILLDOZER: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage, and a person tells me the same old fake news story. This well-meaning person tells me that Marvin Heemeyer was wronged by the town of Granby because the town took the easement to his property where he operated his muffler shop. This, as the story goes, caused him to close his business. That’s the fake news.

When I hear this I stay calm and shake my head in amazement. But I tell them the truth about this shockingly common but completely false assertion.

It’s fake news and a false assumption

The people are surprised to learn that the Town of Granby never took an easement or blocked an easement to Marv Heemeyer’s Mountain View Muffler property. Never.

How do I know this is fake news? I covered almost every single meeting the town had with Heemeyer relating to his efforts to stop a neighbor’s concrete batch plant for three years. All of them but one.

I continued to cover the Town of Granby and continued to communicate with Marvin Heemeyer after the town proceedings.

At no point did the town close, take or block an easement to Heemeyer’s property. He had easy access to that property right up to the day he sold it in 2003, six months before his rampage. That easement and access continued to exist long after he sold the property until the current owners fenced it off six years ago.

Where do people get this fake news idea about the town blocking or taking his easement and therefore ruining his business?

Error-filled blog started the incorrect statement

It started with an error-filled blog posting that went up just two days after the rampage in which the blogger claimed the town took the easement of Heemeyer, which, if true, would have ruined his business and therefore somehow justified his bulldozer-tank rampage. That was the original source of the fake news.

But the town never took or blocked an easement to Heemeyer’s property.

There was talk of an “easement” in Heemeyer’s tapes, but that was for a so-called “maintenance easement” that would have been required if Heemeyer had ever moved forward to hook up his property to local water and sewer lines. The service lines he would have installed would have had to cross a neighbor’s property and that would have required a “maintenance easement.”

That was discovered in 1992 during Heemeyer’s brief deliberations with the Granby Sanitation District about hooking up to the local sewer mains. But when Heemeyer learned that it would be very expensive for him to connect to the sewer, he stormed out of the Sanitation District board meeting and never made a move toward hooking on to the sewer. If he had moved forward with that he would have had to have a “maintenance easement,” which he never tried to acquire because he never moved forward with hooking on to the water and sewer.

Neither the town nor the sanitation board tried to stop or prevent him from hooking on. Neither the town nor the san district board prevented him from acquiring that easement if he had needed it. Heemeyer simply did nothing. The truth is that once he learned about the big expense of hooking on, he didn’t want to hook on and he didn’t want that easement.

This could be where people have gotten the fake news idea that “the town” somehow blocked or took an easement to his business. Didn’t happen.

Heemeyer shut down his business on his own

Sadly, this canard has been foisted on the world in repeated Internet postings on blogs and social media that contend the town ruined Marv’s livelihood by taking this easement, which then somehow justified his attack on the town in his Killdozer that caused $10 million in damage.

I’m not so sorry to ruin such a glorious story line, but Marv never lost an easement that ruined his business. The truth is, he chose to shut down his business all on his own for no apparent reason other than that he wanted out so he could move forward with his plan to terrorize and bulldoze the town.