The Strange Story Of 'Killdozer' And The Man Behind It | HowStuffWorks

Heemeyer's story, at least the interesting part, begins in Granby, a town in a high basin of the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado. Granby, elevation somewhere around 8,000 feet (2,438 meters), is small. Fewer than 2,000 people live there now, and it was no bigger than that in June 2004, when Heemeyer bulldozed his way into history.

Tourism is a draw in the area, though Granby is hardly the center of it. But Rocky Mountain National Park is less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) away. Denver is less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the south. If you want to see the grandeur of the Rockies, any time of the year, and want to get away from the crowds, going through Granby would not be out of the question.

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"It's not like a boutique tourism town, like an Aspen or a Vail. It's not really like that at all," Brower says. "It's really a mix between that and just a service town," with a couple of banks, a concrete plant, an electrical co-op and many businesses that cater to the tourism industry.

Granby also is like a lot of small towns in America in that it's a place where it's relatively easy to get to know people and for people to know you. Like it or not.

"There's new people coming and going a lot here, but it definitely has its good old boy local element as well," Brower says, "an element that Marv really tried to capitalize on."

killdozer
An officer on Main Street looks over the fortified bulldozer driven by Marvin Heemeyer that wreaked havoc in Granby, Colorado. Hyoung Chang/Denver Post via Getty Images

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