Dogpatch Press

The first four episodes of Fur and Loathing are HERE (six episodes are coming out weekly.)

Before Episode 5 comes out, here’s a surprise bonus episode. This mid-series break is making time for the investigation team to develop new leads that emerged after the series began.

Patch interviews Nicky, and pitches him listener questions about investigating the 2014 Midwest Furfest chemical attack. This Dogpatch Press exclusive video is 20 minutes longer than the official half hour audio edit published everywhere else. (In the extra run time, you can hear about another attempt to disrupt the con… Video transcript below).

Exclusive document: FBI interview about the chemical attack.

Never published before, this document is a result of FOIA requests to law enforcement. The team at Brazen gained much more robust responses than past journalists did. From the stacks of papers, this is the FBI’s interview with a member of the Hazardous Materials Team at the Rosemont Public Safety Department.

FBI Interview of Rosemont Public Safety Department Sergeant Greg Brosch_(Redacted)

Interview video transcript

00:00:00:10 – 00:00:12:15
Patch O’Furr
Hello and welcome to the Fur & Loathing bonus episode with me and Nicky Woolf. I’m Patch O’Furr, and I’m here live from sunny, midnight California.

00:00:12:18 – 00:00:18:11
Nicky Woolf
Nice and thank you for staying up so late for this.

00:00:18:11 – 00:00:23:22
Patch O’Furr
I’m a bit of a werewolf, you know. I like the full moon. I like all the night times.

00:00:23:24 – 00:00:29:24
Nicky Woolf
Hell yeah. For listener context it is 1:15 a.m. in San Francisco right now.

00:00:30:10 – 00:00:36:24
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. So, Nicky, let’s do a quick refresher about the developments in the show so far.

00:00:37:07 – 00:01:10:12
Nicky Woolf
So episode four came out on Monday of this week. So we started out the show, we went to Midwest FurFest. We went to see the scene of the crime. Absolutely fabulous time at Midwest FurFest, and seeing the scene of the crime was a real kind of game changer, I think, for us, because the geography of the space is so different from how I’d been imagining and the things that would mean about how the gas had to spread completely kind of changed my view on things.

00:01:10:16 – 00:01:38:13
Nicky Woolf
And then we had this massive reach out through Freedom of Information requests to the FBI and to Rosemont Police, got an incredible treasure trove of documents back, which included the massive twist that the FBI’s final suspect that they were investigating in 2019, which is the last action we know the investigation took, was not the person that you and I started out thinking was our lead suspect.

00:01:38:13 – 00:02:02:15
Nicky Woolf
Well, we’ll get to those in a little bit. But a new suspect at the board, Caleb Kinkade, who we tracked down, he wasn’t named in the docs. We tracked him down using a combination of Google Street View, we knew what town it was in. We did sort of Google Street View around the town. We found the house. We knew he was in a blue house when he was interviewed and we found one.

00:02:02:20 – 00:02:22:20
Nicky Woolf
And then we zoomed in on it and saw a furry paw decal in the window. So we were like, Oh, this is our guy. And so then we found contact details for him. We got in touch and we went to Oklahoma to to chat with him and do our own little interrogation. And that was the episode that just just came out.

00:02:23:05 – 00:02:31:02
Patch O’Furr
I saw that you brought some insight on the police investigation that was even surprising to people who told me that they were there.

00:02:31:07 – 00:02:56:05
Nicky Woolf
Yes. The police investigation, it turns out, looked entirely different from how it did on the outside from the FBI docs. We know that they were working behind the scenes quite a bit more than you and I had both gone into this story thinking, in that they were running down leads in 2015, 2017 and and as late as 2019. So there was stuff going on beneath the surface.

00:02:58:02 – 00:03:19:21
Nicky Woolf
The problem was and we’ll get into that a little bit later, is that despite working on it, they made some pretty colossal screw ups, which seem to have been our guesses as that’s what kind of hobbled the investigation from being able to make any arrests or charges.

00:03:19:24 – 00:03:31:20
Patch O’Furr
Now, tell me, Nicky, what did we do to deserve a bonus episode? Were there any developments after the show started coming out? Can you give us any hints?

00:03:32:10 – 00:04:03:22
Nicky Woolf
So, yes, we’ve had we had a tip. Actually, you had a tip that we’re now chasing down and a few more bits of information have come out still in ongoing conversations with the FBI and a couple of other sources. And so we thought we’d put out a bonus episode to give an extra week to do a bit of reporting and chase down a few more leads before we go into the kind of final, final stretch of the show.

00:04:03:22 – 00:04:09:10
Patch O’Furr
Oh, man, that’s so exciting. Yeah, you’re changing it as we go.

00:04:09:21 – 00:04:18:14
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, I don’t want to say too much about those about those leads, but there’s some some pretty dramatic stuff in there. But no spoilers.

00:04:18:20 – 00:04:30:20
Patch O’Furr
We also got questions from from furry listeners coming up. Yeah, let’s go. Well, let’s see. I’m trying to operate my mouse with my giant paws!

00:04:31:04 – 00:04:58:23
Nicky Woolf
Oh, in the meantime, we can talk about one of the police screw ups, which is relevant to episode four that just came out. And we were doing a kind of re-dive through a lot of the Freedom of Information Act documents. And what happens in episode four, we end episode four coming out pretty much kind of catching the Oklahoma suspect in what we think exonerated him fairly.

00:05:00:10 – 00:05:30:03
Nicky Woolf
We were fairly confident and how we came out of that interview and then relooking through the FOIA docs and we had, you know, 300, 400 pages of documents buried really deep because we were looking at the investigation into Kinkade. One of the things that went wrong on the Caleb Kinkade, we’ll get into this in kind of episode six wrap up the two of the weird things.

00:05:30:03 – 00:06:05:17
Nicky Woolf
Actually, one of the things is that the tip off the FBI were chasing down with Caleb came four years before the incident and we thought that was a typo at first we thought, you know, they got a tip off in 2010. That must have been a typo. Right. But then when they go to interview Kinkade in 2019, they say, Hey, can you explain how this tip off came four years before the incident, to which they note Caleb’s response was, “What the fuck?”

00:06:06:07 – 00:06:27:21
Nicky Woolf
Which, yeah, that’s quite a reasonable response, to be honest, to being told that that some kind of time machine tip off came from before the event. We we have no other information in the documents about what the hell that was about. They said it was with some specificity to the incident. God only knows what that I mean. Honestly, that’s super weird.

00:06:28:19 – 00:07:01:14
Nicky Woolf
But the other thing that came out of this recent deep dive into the documents is that buried, buried way deep in one of the documents is that a different set of officers straight after the incident, when they said they first started looking into Kinkade pretty soon after the chlorine attack and quite early on, two task force officers who didn’t seem to be all that much in the rest of the documents, I think they were just kind of attached to it on the beat for that part of the investigation found–

00:07:01:21 – 00:07:32:21
Nicky Woolf
So Kinkade’s alibi had been that he was home with his disabled father, who he looks after, and that he’d gone to visit his nephew on the Saturday and they found a witness who said and it’s super heavily redacted and poorly phrased, so no one seems to have noticed it, including the rest of the FBI. But they chased down his alibi and it stood up in 2014.

00:07:32:21 – 00:08:05:24
Nicky Woolf
And that’s why we didn’t see it, because it was in the old docs. They were still investigating him for five years after that. So it seems like someone at the at the task force maybe filed the papers wrong or something. But I think the rest of the FBI don’t seem to have seen that part of the documents any more than we did before just a few days ago, because it’s so deeply buried and it’s phrased in a way that unless you really, really parse it, looks like it’s hidden.

00:08:06:07 – 00:08:34:23
Nicky Woolf
It says that they hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving and was at his mother in law’s house. And we thought that meant that he was there for Thanksgiving. There’s actually a full stop there, which is partly covered by one of the redacteds. So that means it actually says, but on the night at ten so 1030, he was placed in Oklahoma, which on top of what he told us, that we feel exonerated him

00:08:34:23 – 00:08:58:10
Nicky Woolf
in the interview, the FBI had also stood up his alibi. So why he was their the main and final suspect in 2019 is even more baffling and speaks even more to the situation where the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing in this investigation. That’s just been so completely wild to me. But yeah, institutional, you know, fuck ups at every turn.

00:08:59:05 – 00:09:33:19
Nicky Woolf
And that’s also on top of the fact that they screwed up the evidence testing on site. And we spoke to someone from the FBI who was in a few episodes ago who said that it was wildly beyond— it seems like the FBI, where we’re trying to get confirmation of exactly when the FBI was informed. It doesn’t seem like they were informed until much later on the Sunday after the attack, because if the FBI had been informed at the time, there is no way they would have allowed people back into the hotel.

00:09:33:21 – 00:10:03:24
Nicky Woolf
They would have treated it as an active crime scene until all investigations were. But the Rosemont police, the Rosemont first responders cleared up the stairwell, cleared the crime scene, tidied it up. Wild, absolutely wild. I can only imagine someone someone at the FBI when they found this out, must have hit the roof. I mean, absolutely gone, like, “What the hell were you doing?”

00:10:03:24 – 00:10:20:23
Nicky Woolf
[Laugh] It was the Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit was called in, and they must have been like, “What the hell are you doing? What the hell have you done? There’s people in our crime scene.”

00:10:22:06 – 00:10:36:06
Patch O’Furr
Well, hey, it’s it’s really interesting to hear it from you. Well I wanted to jump to the other topic, I wanted to ask, how do people like the show? Have you been hearing from people?

00:10:36:09 – 00:11:03:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, seems to be going down really well. The reviews have been great. People seem to like it. It seems like— and this was very meaningful to us while we were making it, because obviously it’s a show for a general audience, but this is also really meaningful to us that the that it be something that the very community could enjoy and be proud of and that would do justice to representing that community.

00:11:03:06 – 00:11:05:09
Nicky Woolf
And I hope we’ve— I hope we’ve achieved that.

00:11:05:09 – 00:11:20:10
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. So I had a question from a listener Dralen Dragonfox over in Toronto, just asked “What kind of response have you received from the broader furry community?” And I guess you just answered that.

00:11:22:12 – 00:11:23:15
Nicky Woolf
Very positive!

00:11:23:15 – 00:11:29:02
Patch O’Furr
But I can jump in as well because I think—

00:11:29:02 – 00:11:30:11
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, what have you been hearing.

00:11:30:11 – 00:11:54:13
Patch O’Furr
So I am seeing fantastic reactions from anybody who’s ever heard the show. Just just beautiful, really great reviews. They love the quality of the show, but also how much you care. And that’s kind of surprising to some people. And I think we’re just lucky to have your professionalism on the story.

00:11:54:13 – 00:11:55:01
Nicky Woolf
Thank you.

00:11:55:01 – 00:12:23:21
Patch O’Furr
There is another side to this, because I am seeing people who obviously have not listened to the show and they’re still spreading the same old denial and the story that, “Oh, it was just an accident. We don’t believe there was ever any crime at all.” And there’s sometimes people are attacking the people who are doing the reporting, calling it fake news, saying there’s nothing new here.

00:12:24:13 – 00:12:47:00
Patch O’Furr
And, you know, it’s kind of disappointing, but it’s— I don’t know how surprising it is, but I also say that’s a great reason that the story needs to be told and people should also know how much work it took. And how much effort we’re putting into it with the whole team over at Brazen.

00:12:47:00 – 00:13:06:15
Nicky Woolf
And also, you’ve been working on this for four years. You’ve been, you know, putting in the lonely legwork of of standing this story up and being like this. This is something that matters. And I think to a certain extent, I think some of it comes down to what we were talking about just before, which is the police didn’t seem to be taking it all that seriously.

00:13:06:15 – 00:13:11:04
Nicky Woolf
So I think quite reasonably, people’s reactions have been, “Alright. So why should we?”

00:13:11:11 – 00:13:21:08
Patch O’Furr
You know what we know. Let me just ask you for a little rundown on the kind of work that you’re doing. First off, how many states have you gone to?

00:13:21:08 – 00:13:46:18
Nicky Woolf
So we have been to Illinois to to Midwest FurFest, and we have been to Oklahoma to talk with Caleb Kinkade, the Oklahoma suspect, the FBI suspect. And we have been to Wisconsin. And that is that trip is going to be a episode five, which comes out next week, a week today, when this when this broadcast.

00:13:46:18 – 00:13:50:14
Patch O’Furr
I remember there was a little bit with me over in California that was pretty cool.

00:13:51:04 – 00:13:56:02
Nicky Woolf
Oh, yeah. Well, I didn’t get to go., which was— I was very sad about that. That was with Nick.

00:13:56:15 – 00:13:58:21
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, we have to meet. I’m going to have to get you a drink.

00:13:59:03 – 00:14:00:21
Nicky Woolf
I know. I’m going to get you a drink.

00:14:01:05 – 00:14:05:06
Patch O’Furr
Yeah. How many helpers are on the team, by the way?

00:14:05:19 – 00:14:32:19
Nicky Woolf
That’s a really good opportunity to shout out to all the people who’ve done so much hard work on this, Arnav and Lucy our researchers have been so fantastic. They’ve done just incredible work. And Goat Rodeo, the whole production team, especially Max and Ian, who worked extremely hard on this. The total size of the team. I mean, it sort of depends how you count it.

00:14:32:19 – 00:14:49:13
Nicky Woolf
There were like some producers who also helped out. Then Nick has helped out with a whole load of edits. That’s Nick who you met in California, but yeah, everyone at Brazen and everyone at Goat Rodeo, it’s just been terrific.

00:14:49:23 – 00:14:54:01
Patch O’Furr
And in your travels, how many people have you talked to so far?

00:14:55:23 – 00:15:38:21
Nicky Woolf
Oh, I’d have to go into our interviews. I think we we reached out to, and in some cases exchanged some messages with, skyward of 100 people. And I think we’ve spoken to and done formal interviews with at least 20, 25 spoken off the record or informal interviews with maybe another 25. So yeah, lots and lots of people, lots of voices have gone into informing this reporting. There’s been a real — and I think quite understandable — reluctance of of people in the community to speak because of how often, you know, the community gets burned by the media, and how often journalists will come in and sort of ridicule or not really

00:15:38:22 – 00:16:04:02
Nicky Woolf
understand, or go through the old kind of tropes of just being like a sort of internet sex thing, you know, from the George Gurley article [in Vanity Fair], even the title of the podcast, Fur & Loathing, as any furry listening to this will know, is the title of a CSI episode that was really just a hit job on the community.

00:16:04:18 – 00:16:27:05
Nicky Woolf
And so then you were talking about this. We talked about how the title will will be received. And I think in that sense, it’s also been positive. People have people have said it— but, you know, people have mentioned it. And when that’s come up on on Twitter or BlueSky, I’ve said, yeah, we went back and forth.

00:16:27:10 – 00:16:41:06
Nicky Woolf
I just personally liked the name and hopefully we can reclaim it. Hopefully we can be the the Google search for that above the CSI thing and sort of memory-hole the CSI. That’s the idea.

00:16:41:11 – 00:17:10:22
Patch O’Furr
So you’ve got a whole ton of people, some very fuzzy and colorful ones and now that makes me curious about one of the very clever ones we’ve already heard from: Caleb. I want to talk about meeting him. And I actually have a listener question from Flen, the silly wolf-otter. So Flen asks, he says, “I’m from North Georgia, but I want to know what Oklahoma was like.”

00:17:10:22 – 00:17:16:09
Patch O’Furr
“I bet it was culture shock and Caleb seems like an interesting guy.”

00:17:16:20 – 00:17:42:06
Nicky Woolf
He’s a fascinating dude. I mean, going to Oklahoma was less of a culture shock for me than than it might have been because I’ve been based in the U.S. as a general assignment news reporter for a really long time. So I hadn’t actually been to Oklahoma, I think, before, but I think that made it the 46th state I’ve been to.

00:17:42:18 – 00:18:12:09
Nicky Woolf
So I’ve only got, I think, Montana, one of the Dakotas and one of the states, two of the states that are basically next to Montana to go. So I’m yeah, I lived in Ohio for a while, so Oklahoma’s bit more southern, but still where we were had a bit of Midwestern vibes as well. That’s going to annoy more people than anything else I say on this show.

00:18:13:11 – 00:18:15:14
Nicky Woolf
But yeah, I think Ohio prepared me for Oklahoma.

00:18:16:03 – 00:18:37:03
Patch O’Furr
Well, a lot more states than I’ve been to! I got to catch up with you, right? Yeah, so when you were chatting with Caleb, I thought it was, you know, really funny to hear stories about fart competitions. But, you know, I told some friends actually recording it is a feat of podcasting.

00:18:37:21 – 00:19:01:00
Nicky Woolf
So yeah, we had a a microphone, a shotgun mic that was on a boom. Luckily for Nick, who was holding it— I don’t know if Nick or Max was holding it, but very much at arm’s length trying to capture the sound. But yeah, I can well believe he’s a champion. He was really a powerfully good farter.

00:19:01:10 – 00:19:04:24
Patch O’Furr
Quite a voice. Did you have to do extra takes?

00:19:05:17 – 00:19:08:13
Nicky Woolf
Oh, he, gave us as many takes as we wanted. Yeah.

00:19:10:01 – 00:19:13:11
Patch O’Furr
Good job! A new milestone in your career.

00:19:14:00 – 00:19:38:18
Nicky Woolf
He was pretty, obviously, and as I say in the episode, somebody being charming and nice doesn’t preclude them from you know, it doesn’t mean their innocence. I think his innocence was showed by the mistakes he made about not knowing in the episode how the attack took place, but boasting about knowing. So he he got it wrong.

00:19:39:05 – 00:20:02:07
Nicky Woolf
So he thought that was a strong indicator. And then that was backed up by the fact that someone on the task force in 2014 before five more years of investigating him, but nonetheless his alibi stood up to the FBI. But yeah, he was he was really nice and he was generous with his time and spends a heck of a yarn.

00:20:02:19 – 00:20:31:01
Patch O’Furr
Okay, well, you know, it must be hard to view just sort of put in the spotlight like that with such a serious story. So I will let that rest for him and move on, because coming up, there’s another suspect. We named him: Robert Sojkowski.

00:20:31:01 – 00:21:03:08
Nicky Woolf
Yeah. This is Robert Sojkowski. Very controversial figure in the community. In the next episode coming up, we start to evaluate where things are with him and but but yeah — another really interesting angle of investigation. I don’t want to go too much further down down that road, but I think I think people are going to be really interested to hear what happened when we went up to Wisconsin.

00:21:03:14 – 00:21:07:20
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, I would avoid spoilers, but you know, I interviewed him in 2018.

00:21:08:06 – 00:21:09:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:09:16 – 00:21:16:07
Patch O’Furr
Let me just ask, what did you do to try to reach him?

00:21:16:07 – 00:21:43:00
Nicky Woolf
It was it was hard to track him down. Not as difficult as tracking Caleb down because, you know, he still has things like his YouTube channel running and we got a whole bunch of numbers for him and a Telegram handle. And the Telegram was still active. So one of the cold calls were made to him is on Telegram and that’s the one he responded to.

00:21:43:16 – 00:21:59:20
Nicky Woolf
I mean, again, this is neither proof of guilt nor innocence, but he has also been open with us and has been willing to talk and has also been generous with his time. So well, you know, that’s not a data point one way or the other, but I think it’s it’s worth saying.

00:22:00:16 – 00:22:05:22
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Did you want to say anything else about the behavior or are we just going to find out?

00:22:06:03 – 00:22:09:17
Nicky Woolf
Let’s let’s hold off on that. We’ll get to that.

00:22:09:17 – 00:22:24:10
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Well, let’s get back to what the listeners want to know. I’ve got a lot of questions and I guess, yeah, we can start out with BowieBarks. And Bowie. asks—

00:22:24:10 – 00:22:25:00
Nicky Woolf
Hello, Bowie.

00:22:28:10 – 00:22:39:18
Patch O’Furr
And Bowie has questions about going to the Midwest FurFest. Seeing that it was your first furry convention, what did you enjoy most?

00:22:40:11 – 00:23:43:14
Nicky Woolf
I loved every second of Midwest FurFest. It was just such a joyous, just a brilliant environment to be and just so visually overwhelming and the vibes were fantastic. My favorite moment of it, and actually someone I forgot to give a shout out to is Tommy Bruce, photographer who was the first furry we ever got in touch with for the show. First person we spoke to, and was very kind and showed me around Midwest FurFest, and has been also kind of our furry moral compass with this. We’ve had this kind of fascinating conversation going and we went to this screaming— er, screening review of a whole bunch of short films made in VRChat.

00:23:44:16 – 00:24:20:21
Nicky Woolf
And they were fabulous. There was a lot of in-jokes that only a few people were getting, so we’d have one film, and like one very specific group in the room would burst out laughing and they were just surreal kind of comedic things. And then interspersed into those were these just beautiful, heartbreaking kind of, you know, goodbyes to to someone who maybe passed away or just I-miss-yous to people who live across the world, many kind of people who only interact and get to get to meet in VRChat.

00:24:22:06 – 00:24:30:18
Nicky Woolf
And so it was like swinging between like laughter and tears the whole time. It was just beautiful, like, really, really moving.

00:24:30:24 – 00:24:43:03
Patch O’Furr
So nice. Wow. Yeah. So Bowie went on to ask, was there anything that challenged you?

00:24:43:07 – 00:25:31:24
Nicky Woolf
Challenged— I mean, just trying to see everything was such a challenge. There’s so much on. We were running from— we went from a panel on the very beginnings of history of the fandom, which was fascinating. Running from there to a panel on— this was dramatic to me., it was not just a panel on fursuit making, it was a panel by three big fursuit makers on just how to get your commission even noticed by them. And you know these are people who are making a suit for $10,000, $15,000 and just to get your commission noticed by them was something that needed a panel that gave advice.

00:25:32:08 – 00:26:00:12
Nicky Woolf
But just getting from all of these panels, from panel to panel to, you know, stall to stall, trying to see everything was exhausting. And I think Cara, who’s the producer who was with me, her Apple Watch or something, said that we’d walked something like 14 kilometers over the course of each day, maybe more. Just doing that in a full fursuit…

00:26:00:12 – 00:26:03:19
Nicky Woolf
… must be— and it is hot. I mean, it is like—

00:26:04:21 – 00:26:06:15
Patch O’Furr
Wow.

00:26:06:15 – 00:26:07:04
Nicky Woolf
So yeah.

00:26:08:09 – 00:26:11:08
Patch O’Furr
This is why they have a fursuit lounge.

00:26:12:03 – 00:26:16:20
Nicky Woolf
Air-conditioned all the way down.

00:26:16:20 – 00:26:37:09
Patch O’Furr
Saves lives. Yeah. Okay, so, boy, I’ve got quite a list here. One more for BowieBarks. And this is a hard one. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this. But you called furries a bellwether for the rest of the world. What you think is coming?

00:26:37:09 – 00:27:01:05
Nicky Woolf
That is a huge question. And I think what I meant was furries and kind of all digital communities to me in this kind of— There’s like a deep theoretical answer to this that it’s more like an essay unto itself, but in brief, I think what the Internet has done is changed the geography of communication almost completely.

00:27:03:00 – 00:27:33:06
Nicky Woolf
And I think the furry fandom is a good example of how you can have a fandom that I think Uncle Kage said it in a really good way when we spoke to him, but it was that it’s a fandom without a corporate piece of content that is being fandomed. It’s like a self-made fandom, you know? It’s not cosplay in the way that people are dressing up as Marvel characters or Disney characters and things like that.

00:27:34:14 – 00:28:09:12
Nicky Woolf
And I don’t think you could have that without the Internet, without that kind of peer-to-peer communication network. But I also think that the effect of that peer-to-peer communication network that allow, you know, folks who might be in a small town, not have a huge amount in common with the people around them and have found the furry community online as that community and again, through these VR videos, we saw a lot of that emotion coming through.

00:28:09:12 – 00:28:50:14
Nicky Woolf
But unfortunately, that same infrastructure makes it much easier for the far right to both infiltrate and organize. And I think within the furry fandom, we saw a lot of that, especially in 2017 when oh God, to even have to name him when when you know who that guy started to try to come to furry conventions. And, you know, these alt right figures saw it as an opportunity to infiltrate and you end up with things like the furry raiders.

00:28:51:18 – 00:29:19:05
Nicky Woolf
So I think the Internet does both of those things. And I think wider society, more more traditional groups in society are starting to experience that as communication becomes more and more similarly online and more kind of mainstream groupings and and even politics. And we’re already seeing, you know, Donald Trump is running for president again. That doesn’t happen without the Internet.

00:29:19:17 – 00:29:24:11
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Next question from Arrkay the Bird. Yeah, Arrkay…

00:29:24:18 – 00:29:25:21
Nicky Woolf
Hello Arrkay!

00:29:26:05 – 00:29:32:10
Patch O’Furr
… asks, is there any hope for justice or new evidence that the police can use to prosecute?

00:29:33:00 – 00:30:12:08
Nicky Woolf
So the thing that’s difficult in that question is one thing we ran up against, we spoke to some experts to try and firm it out and all we could really got was it’s complicated, but we’re fairly sure that there is a statute of limitations issue on what happened. Now, the statute of limitations in Illinois is at a default five years, which is why we think the FBI made a final push to be interviewing Caleb in 2019 because that was just before the five year timeline.

00:30:13:11 – 00:30:42:23
Nicky Woolf
Now, there’s nothing in the documents that specify that there’s a statute of limitations. And one of the formal questions that we’ve asked the FBI for comment on was this question. And they said no comment. Statute of limitations would be different on a federal terrorism charge, which is one of the potential things that could be being looked into. Another thing the FBI wouldn’t answer as is this case still being it’s still open, still considered under investigation.

00:30:42:23 – 00:31:03:09
Nicky Woolf
They wouldn’t say, well, I think pretty standard for the FBI to answer those kind of questions with no comment. But we we don’t know if new information that we bring up from the podcast and we’ve heard from different sources. We’ve spoke to some of the same sources the FBI have. We think we’ve spoken to different sources. We have different eyewitness testimony.

00:31:05:04 – 00:31:18:06
Nicky Woolf
But no idea if if this will lead to more law enforcement action because they’re so opaque and because we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and what kind of pressure they might be under.

00:31:18:07 – 00:31:24:09
Patch O’Furr
Well, that makes a good link to the next question. And this one is also from Dralen Dragonfox.

00:31:25:11 – 00:31:26:01
Nicky Woolf
Hi, Dralen

00:31:27:10 – 00:31:45:18
Patch O’Furr
Dralen says, I love the accidental support that you got from the FBI with the badly redacted FOIA files. Have you seen that before or have you seen them mess up on purpose, like some misspell names so they can say there’s no documents?

00:31:46:14 – 00:32:19:09
Nicky Woolf
That definitely happens. In this case, it doesn’t seem like they were doing redactions to avoid it. It was almost so dramatic compared to previous reporting that happened on this case. We got so much more documents than, say, Vice did when they sent their requests. That was a piece that this maybe five years ago. It could be some sometimes it’s as simple as you capture FOIA officer in the right mood and they’re like, okay, yeah, maybe we will.

00:32:19:13 – 00:32:42:24
Nicky Woolf
Sometimes you’ve no idea whether it’s been run up the chain or not, whether someone at the FBI has said, “OK, we want to get these documents out, maybe they can find something that will allow us to—”. There’s also a lot of accidents that go on. I think a lot of our documents were very poorly redacted and that may have been incompetence.

00:32:43:04 – 00:33:05:10
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know whose. Some of the documents were from Rosemont Police, but were given to us by the FBI for their response. We don’t know who did the redactions that we don’t know if it was Rosemont-redacted or FBI-redacted. I mean, in one case, they put somebody’s Social Security Number unredacted and now that’s—

00:33:06:00 – 00:33:46:01
Nicky Woolf
That’s a screw up. I mean, that should not be in a Freedom of Information Act document with that being there. They also — and this is an interesting sign about how how they think about the furry community — is that they would redact, uh, witnesses, real-world name and not redact their fursona name, which implies they just sort of don’t know how, how core a piece of identity a fursona name is and how easy it would be for someone who really wanted to, to identify, you know, to track down a person with their fursona name.

00:33:46:01 – 00:34:09:22
Nicky Woolf
And in the past I’ve had documents released to me accidentally. I did a FOIA investigation when I was at The Guardian into a national security story about police surveillance. And we sent a Freedom of Information request to, 50-something police departments. And one of them gave us classified documents either by accident or because they wanted them to come out.

00:34:10:07 – 00:34:22:22
Nicky Woolf
So it can it can happen positively. But yeah, there have definitely been stories of purposeful misspellings being introduced into FOIA docs in order to make journalists lives difficult, so it goes both ways.

00:34:22:22 – 00:34:40:17
Patch O’Furr
You really have to finesse it and know what you’re doing. BowieBarks dropped in another comment, he said another podcast was saying to be vague with FOIA to keep them from guessing exactly what you’re trying to get at so they don’t redact it.

00:34:40:24 – 00:35:12:03
Nicky Woolf
I would say if we’re doing advice to you know, general FOIA advice ,you can’t really ask a vague question because they aren’t giving yes or no answers, they’re either providing a document or not. So document specificity is the most important thing if you’re looking for a police report and you know roughly what date, all that kind of thing is what I would put in.

00:35:12:05 – 00:35:38:10
Nicky Woolf
It’s not the same thing as asking a journalistic question. So you can’t put a FOIA request in saying something like, is this still active? You have to say, we want all email communication between X and Y date between this agent’s email address and responding to a keyword search of X, Y and Z.

00:35:39:01 – 00:35:59:22
Nicky Woolf
That’s the kind of thing that helps with a FOIA response. If you know even more about what the documents might be, that’s your kind of best shot going in with a Freedom of Information Act request. If you give them any vagueness, that’ll give them an opportunity, an excuse to to not to not give you back anything.

00:36:00:23 – 00:36:42:00
Nicky Woolf
So that’s FOIA advice, okay. Let me look at Arnav and see if that’s good FOIA advice. Arnav’s the FOIA king. I’m getting a thumbs up on that advice. On the subject of FOIAs, we will be sharing some of the FOIA docs as we go and we will have one exclusively for Dogpatch Press, which will be the first original incident report that people can go through and read. It’ll go up on Monday along with this video, so people can have a look through and get a little window into what a FOIA document looks like and see what happened on on the night as well through the through the eyes of the first responders.

00:36:43:18 – 00:36:45:14
Nicky Woolf
So that’ll be fun.

00:36:45:15 – 00:36:57:18
Patch O’Furr
That is that is some exciting direct documents there. How much support did you have from the FBI and local police, versus how much did you actually have to work in spite of them?

00:36:58:19 – 00:37:27:15
Nicky Woolf
Except for the surprisingly generous FOIA response we’ve had very, very little cooperation from either the FBI or Rosemont. None of our direct questions to them, none of the official questions have been answered with anything other than a no comment. Even for working with the security agencies, which I’ve done a lot of before in my career., this has been a real code of silence.

00:37:27:24 – 00:38:05:01
Nicky Woolf
This is unusually unhelpful, non-compliant surprisingly, which is what makes this and this is just kind of vibe-based, it is how they would be responding— It’s more likely how they would be responding if this was still an active case or if they thought this could still be an active case. But it’s also, to a certain extent, it’s their default way of being so it’s hard to read too much into that.

00:38:05:01 – 00:38:22:06
Nicky Woolf
But yeah, we’ve had to work with the documents, which again have been hugely, hugely important to the to the investigation. But in terms of actively speaking with the FBI in Rosemont, it’s been despite them definitely.

00:38:22:06 – 00:38:39:12
Patch O’Furr
Okay. Well, that might actually answer the next question. And this is again, this is Arrkay the Bird and Arrkay asks, “Are there interviews coming up with law enforcement who took the case seriously?”

00:38:39:12 – 00:39:17:22
Nicky Woolf
No, they have not allowed us access to any of the officers involved or anyone who might even represent the officers involved. And again, I think we said this earlier, but Agent Defeo, Shaun Rose, if you guys want to get in contact, I think you guys have done good work and good for both of you for sticking with it in what seem to be quite difficult, internal conditions. If either if you want to chat my, you know, my emails are open. But yeah we’ve been offered no access to them whatsoever.

00:39:17:22 – 00:39:52:24
Patch O’Furr
Okay, let’s see. Well, we have a question from Bean and you know, this is a funny one. I want to start off saying that when you choose a fursona, there are certain cartoon characters that are just instantly, you know, it’s fun to recognize. Like, for example, if you want to have an animal who is a bank robber then it might be a raccoon — you’ve got stripes, you’ve got the mask.

00:39:53:15 – 00:39:54:15
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:55:08 – 00:40:01:01
Patch O’Furr
So If you chose a persona, what would it be?

00:40:01:13 – 00:40:26:03
Nicky Woolf
So this is a great question because going into when we went to Midwest FurFest, we had this idea of doing a scene where we get people together and, you know, find find Nicky’s fursona. And obviously my last name is Woolf. So part of that might be easy. But I was also thinking of, you know, some based on puns and things like that.

00:40:26:13 – 00:41:14:09
Nicky Woolf
But the more people we spoke to, the more I started to get the feeling that actually that was maybe not offensive necessarily, but kind of in poor taste. I think it was Tommy again who who might have said this but it was or it might have been someone else we spoke to — but it was the idea that that it wasn’t taking it seriously, that a fursona is for a lot of people, a really meaningful and important part of their lives and picking one, you know, finding a pun and being like what’s mine felt like it wasn’t taking that as seriously as it deserved to.

00:41:14:09 – 00:41:37:13
Nicky Woolf
Someone even might have said that it’s sort of like, what’s your gaysona? You know, like and that kind of— they’re not directly comparable. But yeah, we sort of shelved that idea as being in slightly poor taste. But I think given my name is Woolf, if I was— it would be a wolf, I think.

00:41:37:13 – 00:41:54:16
Patch O’Furr
Let’s see. Well, now Bowie is here with another question. Boy, he’s a very curious dog here. Will you be involved with the community more or will you do any other investigations related to furries?

00:41:55:04 – 00:42:24:15
Nicky Woolf
So I already went into this with lots of friends in the fandom. I’ve come out with lots more. I’d love to go to more cons. I had such a great time. So yeah, I think I’ll definitely stay involved. And other investigations, absolutely. Looking for more stories. It’s part of my— my kind of beat is internet subcultures and furries are such a huge part of that

00:42:24:15 – 00:42:46:21
Nicky Woolf
Actually, so for example, in the QAnon podcast I did, we worked very closely with a guy called Fred Brennan who’s also in the fandom, which is interesting. So yeah, it just shows how much crossover there is with the furry fandom with other kind of internet subcultures and communities.

00:42:48:10 – 00:42:58:20
Patch O’Furr
Okay, let’s see. Well, Arrkay asks, “Are there any ideas for a season two?” I’m just going to say you’ll find out.

00:42:58:20 – 00:43:15:06
Nicky Woolf
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch this space or listen to this space, I guess. But I will say if people— help in terms of getting season two: if everyone can leave nice reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and things, that always helps.

00:43:15:13 – 00:43:40:04
Patch O’Furr
So tell all your friends, share it around, since your fine work is worth sharing. I guess we’re getting towards wrapping up a little bit. And I just wanted to point out — one point the show makes is how much the police messed up. I’m just curious, do you see any lessons?

00:43:40:04 – 00:44:28:23
Nicky Woolf
There’s some specific ones and some general ones. Some of the specific ones, as we found out and a lot of this was in the first two episodes, but we found out some pretty unpleasant stuff about Rosemont Police Department itself. Rosemont is this weird, financially designed town. It’s got a population of about 3,000 at a budget in the high millions because all these conventions happen, there are all these kind of business centers, the airport hotels are there, and they’re a tiny police force run internally, that’s independent of a major police force like Chicago.

00:44:30:06 – 00:44:59:08
Nicky Woolf
And it seems like there were some quite serious organizational failures within that police department that we think may well have contributed quite heavily to the early mistakes that were made. And certainly there were other allegations of things going on in Rosemont Police Department that that we heard that build a picture of it being pretty disorganized place. And for some of the people we spoke to a kind of unpleasant place to work too.

00:44:59:16 – 00:45:31:00
Nicky Woolf
And then the organizational stuff is whenever something like this happens, you have so many different agencies that get involved, so much paperwork is produced. When you have three different divisions at the FBI, you’ve got field office, you’ve got the WMD unit, you’ve got the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and then you’ve got the Rosemont Police Department, you’ve got Chicago Fire, who were also some of the first responders, because Rosemont asked for their assistance.

00:45:31:00 – 00:46:12:03
Nicky Woolf
And that’s how you end up with stuff like one part of the investigation checking up on, say, Caleb’s alibi, but other parts of the investigation seeming not to have realized. And you just end up with all these communication failures where one part of the investigation doesn’t know what the other part is doing. Rosemont Police Department destroyed what might have been some crucial evidence, such as the tapes of police interviews with suspects. We are trying to figure out if that’s standard practice.

00:46:12:11 – 00:46:31:02
Nicky Woolf
That’s one of the things that we’ve asked the FBI. That’s another of the things the FBI has given us a flat “no comment” on is where the chain of custody of the evidence is, because, again, they cleared the crime scene straight afterwards. This is the Rosemont responders. We don’t know where the broken glass from the device ended up.

00:46:31:02 – 00:47:00:09
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know if that’s in some kind of locker somewhere or if it was literally just thrown away. That all kinds of different people who are handling evidence all with different aims, and then you’ve got what people are investigating for. We don’t know what specific crime is being investigated. And that’s an important question for the statute of limitations question because a federal terrorist defense will have a different statute of limitations to the basic Illinois five years.

00:47:00:24 – 00:47:33:10
Nicky Woolf
We don’t know if the case was being investigated as a terroristic crime or as something lesser. We think if they were making a push for the five-year statute of limitations, they were looking for something lesser than than a terrorist offense. But we don’t know. All of this stuff is very opaque. It’s hard to come out of this question with what is, I think, obvious to anyone who’s followed any kind of the news in the United States…

00:47:33:17 – 00:47:39:23
Nicky Woolf
… for any of the last ten years. But I think some law enforcement reform probably wouldn’t go amiss in general.

00:47:40:14 – 00:48:07:03
Patch O’Furr
So earlier I mentioned that there were non-listeners who were just denying and dismissing the story, saying there wasn’t a crime, there’s no news, you know, I mean they haven’t listened to it. So I just wanted to make a little reminder about the gravity of the story. And if we put the attack next to others like it, is it really fair to call this one of the biggest ones?

00:48:07:20 – 00:48:51:12
Nicky Woolf
Yes, ultimately. There has not been, as far as I know, an attack— a single attack of this scale. The reason that we’ve been calling it the second biggest chemical weapon attack is that the 2001 anthrax campaign, I think, hospitalized fewer people but killed three people. And some of that— one of the things we’ve heard from law enforcement that we’ve talked to who weren’t involved in the case, but former law enforcement who are giving us advice, is that the fact that nobody died, I think may have put it in a different law enforcement category, even though 19 people were hospitalized, including one infant.

00:48:51:12 – 00:49:18:22
Nicky Woolf
And it’s very serious. But, yeah, there’s not really been anything of this scale before or since. And yeah, we’ve spoken to a lot of former former law enforcement and former FBI who’ve all started off saying, Yeah, “What the hell are you talking about?” And we run down the details of the story, the scale of the, you know, the casualties, the number of people who were hospitalized.

00:49:19:08 – 00:49:42:07
Nicky Woolf
And universally, all of their responses have been, “Holy shit, how am I just hearing about this now for the first time?” And I think that’s a very good question. I mean, we’ve spoken to people who were working in the chemical weapons investigative unit for national FBI. And when someone like that is saying, “How the fuck did this not come across my desk?”

00:49:43:23 – 00:49:50:07
Nicky Woolf
I think that’s a really good question. How the hell did that not come across their desk?

00:49:50:07 – 00:49:56:13
Patch O’Furr
Is there anything we could say on behalf of the victims? Did you speak to anybody who was hospitalized?

00:49:57:01 – 00:50:20:07
Nicky Woolf
We didn’t. And I think quite reasonably so. We have a lot of written testimonial sources and lot of contemporary documents we got in touch with— we reached out to almost everyone who we knew was affected and people declined to speak, I think probably quite reasonably, because it was a very traumatic event.

00:50:20:07 – 00:50:45:20
Nicky Woolf
So I wouldn’t want to speak on on their behalf. I do think one of the questions and maybe a question for you and and also a question that we want to ask for people in the community is what should a punishment for this crime be? What would be fair justice? What would that look like? And that’s something that isn’t my place to answer.

00:50:46:20 – 00:51:16:08
Patch O’Furr
One of the things that stands out to me, which I don’t know, is part of your, you know, the math behind figuring out what to do with this story. But from inside the community, I recognize this attack is actually only the first one that was a terror attack or a would-be terror plan that was targeting Midwest FurFest.

00:51:17:01 – 00:51:37:12
Patch O’Furr
And the other one is generally not even recognized. People know half of the story but they don’t know the deeper half and that half of the story is in 2019 when alt-right personality Milo [Yiannopoulos] wanted to go to the con and people.

00:51:39:14 – 00:51:40:09
Nicky Woolf
He-who-shall-not-be-named.

00:51:40:14 – 00:52:12:15
Patch O’Furr
Yeah, sorry, we’ll just use— we’ll just call him Mr. M. Well, in 2019, Mr. M there, wanted to attend Midwest FurFest and it was recognized as a kind of a troll plan and he was rebuffed. He was rejected in advance of the con. But what almost nobody saw or knew was there was a deeper plan to bring the Proud Boys.

00:52:13:04 – 00:52:37:06
Patch O’Furr
And of course, they went on to do the January 6 riot at the Capitol. So this was a plan to bring domestic terrorism, street violence by a group that is now officially convicted of terrorism to a furry convention. So here we go. There’s this. This is the second time Midwest FurFest was targeted.

00:52:37:22 – 00:53:09:00
Nicky Woolf
And it’s not just that. Right. You know, even earlier this year, there was another bomb threat. The furry fandom is often targeted by by this kind of thing. And it is at that intersection where trolling can sometimes spill over into actual violence. Right. And that, I think, is a risk that the it’s quite active all the time. Thank you so much for chatting with me, Patch, for this bonus episode.

00:53:09:00 – 00:53:31:07
Nicky Woolf
Always a pleasure. Hello to viewers on Dogpatch Press. Subscribe to Fur & Loathing wherever you get your podcasts if you’re watching this. And if you’re listening to this as part of the feed, I hope you’re enjoying the show. Don’t forget to leave a review — unless you’re not enjoying the show, in which case, I guess, well done for getting five episodes in anyway.

00:53:31:07 – 00:53:41:11
Nicky Woolf
And yeah, tune in next week for our penultimate episode. We start to close in on some theories.

00:53:42:06 – 00:53:43:01
Patch O’Furr
Thank you so much.

00:53:43:04 – 00:53:44:19
Nicky Woolf
Thank you! As always, a pleasure.

00:53:44:19 – 00:53:55:17
Patch O’Furr
I’m so glad you gave so much time and attention and all of your professionalism and your talent. And yeah, I’m just looking forward to hearing more.

00:53:55:17 – 00:54:14:13
Nicky Woolf
And thank you so much for all your hard work on this story. It’s been fantastic and thank you for staying up so late to chat.

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