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Vigilante Justice: Vendettas

August 1, 2019·55 min·4 clips

Jody Ploche, now 46, says his father's act was not what he wanted—'I didn't ask for Daddy to kill him... Jeff would have spent the rest of his life in prison, which to me would have been a better punishment.'

1. The Truth About True Crime host Amanda Knox examines two vendetta cases in an episode focused on vigilantism motivated by personal vengeance rather than fear or tribalism. 2. Knox is the host; voices also include Jody Ploche (now 46, Gary Ploche's son), Colonel Mike Barnett (former chief of detectives in Baton Rouge), and Patrick Brower (editor of the Granby, Colorado newspaper Sky High News and one of Hemeyer's listed targets). 3. The episode argues that vigilante hero worship depends heavily on which details the audience chooses to focus on, and that the full story of each case reveals more emotional and moral fallout than the legend acknowledges. 4. In 1984, Gary Ploche shot Jeff Doucette in the ear at the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport after Doucette's rape kit came back positive for abusing Ploche's son Jody, who had also been kidnapped and taken to California. 5. Colonel Mike Barnett, escorting Doucette through the airport, did not recognize Gary Ploche until the moment he turned and fired; the shooting was captured on a TV news camera and the footage has been viewed over 20 million times on YouTube. 6. Gary Ploche hung up the payphone before being tackled—a detail Knox finds 'almost touching'—and told the camera operator: 'If it had been your child, you would have done the same thing too.' 7. Doucette, whose prison time would have been substantial given kidnapping and aggravated kidnapping charges, died without a trial; Gary Ploche pleaded no contest to manslaughter and received five years probation with no jail time. 8. Jody Ploche, the victim the shooting was meant to avenge, was angry at his father—he had wanted Jeff Doucette to go to prison for the rest of his life, did not want his abuse publicized, and heard his own story on the school bus radio. 9. Jody says: 'I didn't ask for Daddy to kill him... Jeff would have spent the rest of his life in prison, which to me would have been a better punishment'—and names the right to a fair trial as something even Doucette deserved. 10. Colonel Barnett expresses similar ambivalence: he understands Gary Ploche's reaction emotionally but argues that 'everyone has to live by the law or we have chaos,' and notes that Jeff Doucette was denied his day in court. 11. The Baton Rouge community was roughly split, with an estimated 25-to-1 ratio of calls praising Gary's action over those calling for prosecution—a dynamic Knox attributes to the public's limited access to Jody's perspective. 12. The second case: Marvin Hemeyer, a 52-year-old muffler shop owner in Granby, Colorado, spent over a decade in disputes with neighbor Cody Docheff and the Granby Town Board of Trustees over property rezoning and a concrete batch plant, ultimately building a 70-ton armored bulldozer in secret over 18 months. 13. Hemeyer recorded two and a half hours of pre-rampage tapes describing his grievances—the $60,000-to-$70,000 sewer connection fee, the lawsuit he lost on every count, the townspeople he felt had 'taken away my life, my future, my hope'—and framing his plan as divinely ordained. 14. In the tapes, Hemeyer describes the specific moment of commitment: sitting in a hot tub weeping until a peace came over him that he interpreted as God's confirmation, stating 'I'm carrying the cross willingly now.' 15. Patrick Brower, the local newspaper editor Hemeyer listed as one of his targets, describes the June 4, 2004 rampage: the 911 call about a 'weird looking tank slash bulldozer,' the concrete batch plant destroyed first, Cody Docheff trying and failing to stop the machine, police unable to penetrate the armor. 16. Hemeyer fired three rifles—a .30 caliber, a .50 caliber, and a .203 semi-automatic—at police and targets throughout the rampage; five children were evacuated from the town hall two minutes before the killdozer destroyed it; Brower ran from his collapsing newspaper office to protect his pregnant wife. 17. The killdozer stopped after its cooling hose blew and overheated, causing $7 million in damage before Hemeyer killed himself inside the sealed machine. 18. Fifteen years later, Hemeyer's killdozer is memorialized on YouTube videos with overwhelmingly positive comments—'the last great American folk hero,' 'a true patriot'—and on t-shirts reading 'Tread on Them' and 'Get Mad and Get Even.' 19. Knox argues that both Gary Ploche and Marvin Hemeyer are celebrated because the public simplifies complex, desperate men into clean vigilante heroes, ignoring the emotional fallout on their families and victims, and that 'stepping around those safeguards is what makes vigilantism fundamentally selfish.' 20. People drawn to true crime that interrogates the moral psychology of public sympathy, or who are curious about the cultural mythology of vigilante justice, will find the episode analytically strong; listeners expecting straightforward narrative crime coverage may find Knox's editorializing more prominent than they expect.

As heard by us

A sober look at revenge, trauma, and why understanding a motive is not the same as endorsing it.

Vigilante Justice: Vendettas uses Gary Poche's attack on Jeff Doucette to sit with a hard tension: revenge can feel emotionally legible and still fail as justice. The clearest voice is Jody's adult perspective.

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Why you'd press play

If revenge feels understandable, this episode asks what justice still owes the people around it, and why due process matters.

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