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Criminal
The Boy Scout
00:46:23
When David Hahn was 16, he started working on something that caught the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the FBI.
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- [00:01]
Phoebe Judge
Support for this show comes from Strawberry Me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job or are you stuck in one you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from Strawberry Me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to Strawberry Me Unstuck to claim a special offer. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list, like your Uncle Ricky, who ruined every single one of your wedding photos because his fly was open. Get him a three pack of new underpants. And with Amazon Black Friday week starting November 20th, you can save up to 40% on the gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares. And the gifts they need, like underpants and Ricky, wear them, please. Hi, it's Phoebe. I have some good news about our membership program, Criminal Plus. Maybe you've heard me say it before, but being a member of Criminal plus is the number one thing you can do to support our work. And as of this week, we're making that membership even better. Criminal plus is officially joining Patreon. Here's what it means. No ads on anything. We make bonus episodes where you get to know the people who make these shows. It's like being in the room with us while we work. We get distracted. We tell stories. We talk about books and tv. We disagree about hot dogs. Criminal plus members join us for virtual live events. We can talk with you and you can talk with each other in chat rooms. That's something you all have been asking for for a long time. If you're not already a member of Criminal plus, look in the show notes for a link to sign up or go to patreon.com criminal that's patreon.com criminal right now, if you sign up for an annual membership, you get two months for free. There are already some really fun things waiting for you when you join, including more than 50 bonus episodes, an upcoming live event, an a pretty great hat. Thanks very much for your support. Now, here's the show. Can you describe Golf Manor?
- [02:24]
Ken Silverstein
It's like a little perfect little suburban subdivision that had a back to the future charm. It's in the suburbs of Detroit. It's outside of Detroit.
- [02:32]
Phoebe Judge
Author Ken Silverstein.
- [02:34]
Ken Silverstein
And I mean, if you want peace and quiet, it just seems perfectly idyllic. You would never expect anything out of the ordinary to happen there. The most unusual thing you'd spot would be a Mr. Softy Ice Cream truck pulling up and Kids running up to get ice cream. You know, that's the type of neighborhood it is.
- [02:55]
Phoebe Judge
On June 26, 1995, Dottie Peace, who lived in Golf Manor, was driving home from work and saw something strange in her next door neighbor's yard.
- [03:06]
Ken Silverstein
She pulls into her driveway and there are a group of men dressed in moon suits, and they were, you know, like something out of some nightmare, you know, Twilight Zone episode, swarming around this perfect little manicured lawn. And they were focused on this potting shed in the backyard. And they were dismantling this potting shed with electric saws, then stuffing it into these steel drums with radioactive warning signs. It must have been very hard to process this scene.
- [03:48]
Phoebe Judge
What did she think was going on?
- [03:53]
Ken Silverstein
She really had no idea initially. And the men in the moon suits weren't being terribly forthcoming. They weren't being forthcoming at all. And there were a group of neighbors standing out, and she went up to join them, and nobody really knew what was going on. But one of the neighbors told Dottie that there'd been someone who'd woken up, you know, in the middle of the night and saw this strange, eerie glow emanating from the potting shed, which made Dottie even more nervous and alarmed. And she went to her house and called her husband and she said, dave, there are men in funny suits walking around here. You've got to do something.
- [04:39]
Phoebe Judge
Dottie Peace's next door neighbors were a couple named Michael Polasek and Patty Hahn. Patty had a teenage son, David, who stayed with them on weekends. She and his father were divorced. The men in the moon suits were there because of something David had done, something that had caught the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the FBI. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Tell me a little bit about what David Hahn was like growing up as.
- [05:25]
Ken Silverstein
A, you know, five, six, seven year old. He was, you know, a traditional young boy growing up in the suburbs. As he got a little bit older, you know, most boys, like, ride their bikes, you know, play baseball. But David became very, very obsessed with science.
- [05:50]
Phoebe Judge
David's parents got divorced when he was 9. He went to live with his father, Ken, during the week. Not long after the divorce, Ken began dating a woman named Kathy. And within a year, they bought a house together about 45 minutes away from Gulf Manor. When David was 10, in the late 1980s, Kathy's father gave him a book, an out of print copy of the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.
- [06:19]
Ken Silverstein
It was written for young boys and girls, and it was written in, like, the 60s you know, this was the age where, you know, it was believed that science would solve all of our problems. You know, it was for kids, but it confidently asserted that, you know, not too long in the future, we'd all be driving around in, like, Jet. You know, it would be like the Jetsons, and science would solve everything from diseases. We'd have probably Martian colonies. It was just this incredibly utopian vision. And it resonated with David. He became very, very quickly obsessed with the book. And there was a little section that he read over and over and over.
- [07:10]
Phoebe Judge
Again on a page with the heading, what's ahead in Chemistry? There is a short section called Atomic Energy that read, the force hidden in the atom will be turned into light and heat and power for everyday uses. And then it said, do you want to share in the making of that astonishing and promising future?
- [07:32]
Ken Silverstein
Well, David did, for all sorts of different reasons, but he wanted to be part of that.
- [07:39]
Phoebe Judge
By the time David was 12, he was reading his father's college chemistry textbooks. His report cards at school were usually terrible, except for science. He started making his own fireworks using a formula he'd found in a library book. He got the magnesium shavings he needed from an auto shop and the metal that made the fireworks red from highway safety flares that he bought at the hardware store and split open. He'd put on fireworks shows for the neighborhood.
- [08:09]
Ken Silverstein
He was always sort of shy, but he was like. It made him. It was a way for him to be popular.
- [08:15]
Phoebe Judge
He set up a laboratory in his bedroom at his father's house and conducted most of the experiments in the Golden Book of Chemistry. He started mowing lawns so he could afford the equipment and chemicals. One time, he followed the book's instructions for producing chloroform and ended up passing out after he held it up to his nose. He didn't tell his parents about it when he woke up.
- [08:40]
Ken Silverstein
He didn't have a lot of oversight. And, you know, his parents thought it was cool. I mean, hey, you know, better science than, you know, hanging out with rowdy teenagers or getting into drugs or anything. But then they started getting a little bit concerned because there were, like, little explosions and accidents happening in the bedroom, and there were burn marks and holes in the walls. The carpet was stained. They had to rip it out. You know, it looked like a war zone or something.
- [09:13]
Phoebe Judge
His parents told him he couldn't do any more experiments in his bedroom, but he could keep doing them in the basement. When David wired up a bug zapper to the house's electricity and Used it to raise and lower the voltage throughout the. His stepmother started to lose patience and told his father that he really had to do something. So his father decided to convince David to join the boy scouts. David's father had been a boy Scout growing up and thought it would be a healthy distraction. David loved it, but he kept doing his experiments. He started working other jobs to pay for them. One was as a grocery bagger at Kroger supermarket. One day, another employee dropped eight containers of ammonia on the floor. When they broke, the fumes, which can be dangerous, spread through the store. David knew just what to do. He ran to the aisle with toilet bowl cleaners, grabbed one called the works, and poured the bottle on the spilled ammonia. It created a huge white cloud, but the smell went away. The works had an acid component that neutralized the ammonia base. David's boss, who thought he had made a toxic gas when he saw the cloud, got ready to evacuate the store and fired David. He apologized later when he learned from poison control that David had done exactly what he should have.
- [10:43]
Ken Silverstein
One night, his father and stepmother were just sitting up in the living room watching tv, and there was a huge explosion coming from the basement. And they ran down there, and David was lying on the floor, barely conscious. His eyebrows were smoking is what they told me. And he had been playing around with. As part of one of his experiments with red phosphorus. And he wasn't aware how that could easily trigger an explosion. So he'd been pounding it with a screwdriver. And when he was doing that, it triggered this explosion. And he, you know, they had to take him to the hospital, and he had to have his eyes flushed. And for months he had to go see an ophthalmologist. And, you know, it could have been. He was lucky. It could have been far worse. But then his father and stepmother were like, okay, that's it. No more experimenting. And like. So David did what every teenager would do under the circumstances. He pretended to comply. But what he did instead was simply. He shifted his laboratory from the basement out to the potting shed at his mother's home in Golf Manor. And his mother and her boyfriend, every once in a while, they'd see something that they thought was a little strange. Like, you know, David would routinely wear a gas mask when he went out to the potting shed. And he'd sometimes, you know, stay out there until 2 or 3 in the morning. And there'd be, you know, there'd be like, flashing lights coming from the potting shed and all, but it didn't seem that out of the ordinary and you know, like, I don't know about you, but as a teenager, my God, I mean, I did incredibly reckless, stupid stuff and nobody was paying attention. Okay, it's strange, but it's, it's great. Like David's focused. He's getting at least he's getting A's in science class and he's excited about school, at least about science.
- [12:59]
Phoebe Judge
And he was still very active in his scout troop, although he was thinking about dropping out by the time he was 14 because it took time away from his experiments. But when he talked to his father about it, he convinced David to keep going.
- [13:14]
Ken Silverstein
His father really wanted him to to become an Eagle Scout because his father hadn't had fallen just short at the.
- [13:22]
Phoebe Judge
Time, only about 2% of scouts made it to Eagle Scout. To do it, David would have to earn 21 merit badges. Some were required like first aid, personal fitness and camping. But others were elective. And one of them was the Atomic Energy merit badge. David scoutmaster later said that he was the only scout in the history of their troop to try for it.
- [13:49]
Ken Silverstein
The Atomic Energy merit badge pamphlet that he was using to get his merit badge was more or less written by the Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society and the Edison Electric Institute, which is a trade group of utility companies, many which had nuclear plants. So there was no skepticism, there was no questioning of whether this was good for the country, whether it might be dangerous. It was just at the level of the golden book of chemistry experiments.
- [14:26]
Phoebe Judge
One project you could do to earn the merit badge was to build a.
- [14:30]
Ken Silverstein
Little model reactor using ping pong balls and tennis cans. And you know, just the sort of thing you'd see like at a teenage science fair. That's of course what most kids do, but not David.
- [14:54]
Phoebe Judge
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- [17:35]
Ken Silverstein
This is a special type of nuclear reactor that would produce more energy than it consumed. It was designed in a way that you'd put in, let's just say, to make it easier, although obviously this is not a precise analogy. But you know, if you went to the gas station and you filled your tank, you'd never really have to fill it again because your car would be generating more gasoline than it was consuming.
- [18:07]
Phoebe Judge
The US Government had been attempting to make breeder reactors since the 1940s. The first one had a core meltdown within a few years and the facility had to be permanently closed. Another one had a partial meltdown just three months after it started generating electricity and was shut down for years. In the 1970s, the government poured money into a breeder reactor project in Tennessee, and By the early 1980s it was the largest public works project in the United States. In 1983, it became clear it would cost too much to finish the project and they had to give it up. Ten years later, David decided to try.
- [18:52]
Ken Silverstein
And you know, when you're a Teenager. It's not that crazy. I mean, you might think, well, of course it's crazy to think that you could build a breeder reactor. But, I don't know. I mean, I had crazy ideas when I was that age. You know, you think you can achieve anything. But for David, it was the validation, the recognition. You know, it was a way for David, you know, like other kids might excel at again, baseball or basketball or something. But David, science, he. It was something that he was very good at.
- [19:27]
Phoebe Judge
David found a diagram of a breeder reactor in one of his father's college textbooks. But it didn't have all the details about how you might put it together and what materials you'd need. So David wrote letters to the organizations listed in the Eagle Scout Atomic Energy merit badge pamphlet.
- [19:47]
Ken Silverstein
He told me he was writing, like, up to 20 letters a day, and he was writing to industry and to the Department of Energy. And he would write letters claiming sometimes that he was a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, which he attended, and that he needed material or information to engage his students and to get them excited about nuclear power.
- [20:18]
Phoebe Judge
Most of the time it didn't work, but for every 10 letters he sent, he'd get a couple of replies. David exchanged a lot of letters with the Director of isotope Production and Distribution at the Department of Energy, a man named Donald Erb, and also with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he learned that a lot of radioactive materials weren't as hard to get as you would think. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent him a list of sources. Uranium, which David needed, was hard to find, but David had learned he could make his own. He'd read in a scientific encyclopedia that the isotope thorium 232 can become uranium 233. And thorium, which was named after the Norse God of thunder, Thor, was something David could find. The American Nuclear Society had sent him a brochure called Dreams and Dragons, which said that Thorium 232 is used to coat a part in gas lanterns to make them glow more brightly. David managed to get a few dozen gas lanterns from camping surplus stores, but it wasn't enough. So he paid someone who worked at a camping equipment store to steal some from the storeroom. It took David almost a whole weekend to turn them into ash with a blowtorch. When he was done, he stored it in milk jugs and shoe boxes, but he wanted to make it more radioactive. So he cut open batteries and pried lithium from the center, and he heated the lithium with the ash. He got out a GEIGER counter he'd ordered from a catalog. It started clicking as soon as he turned it on. Did he know about the danger of radioactive materials?
- [22:14]
Ken Silverstein
I mean, he. He knew a little bit about. About it, but he just didn't take it seriously. I mean, he did take some precautions. He knew there were some dangers. So, you know, he wore a gas mask in the potting shed. That'd take care of it. You know, he didn't have proper material, but he put together a little makeshift lead poncho. He, you know, would throw out his clothes sometimes. I mean, he changed his shoes. He left them in the backyard. You know, he wasn't taking elaborate precautions. You know, there was all sorts of information out there that might have given him caution, but there was nothing that was going to deter him. He took this, you know, this fantasy version of a 1960s book, the Golden Book of Chemistry experiments, and he didn't really stray too far from the utopian version that was presented to him.
- [23:15]
Phoebe Judge
To transform the thorium into uranium, David needed to build something called a neutron gun. He got a block of lead and hollowed it out with a chisel, and then he had to find the right elements to fill the chamber. One of them was easy to find. It was just aluminum, which David bought from a chemical supplier. But the other element was less available. It had to be a certain kind of radioactive substance. David had his heart set on radium, which the Golden Book of chemistry called a miracle element. In the early 1900s, radium was used in all kinds of products, from lipstick to energy drinks. Clock faces and dials were painted with a radium infused paint to make them glow. The employees at the clock and watch factories who did the painting, usually young women, were told the paint was harmless.
- [24:13]
Ken Silverstein
So they take these little paintbrushes with quite thin point and put them in their mouth to, you know, with the radium paint, to sort of make a point with the tip of the little paintbrush they were using.
- [24:24]
Phoebe Judge
Many of them became very sick or died of radiation poisoning. We have an episode about this. It's called the dial painters. The women took legal action against their employers in highly publicized cases, which helped lead to the creation of osha, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and better protections for people who work with chemicals. David didn't know about what had happened to the women who had painted the clocks, but he did know about the clocks.
- [24:56]
Ken Silverstein
So he would take his Geiger counter that he had mounted on the dashboard of his car and drive around Detroit, heading to junkyards and antique stores and taking in his Geiger counter to see if, you know, if there was anything that he might be able to buy to collect the radium he needed. And this was slow going. You know, spending the weekend driving around, and you're, you know, if you find anything, you're scraping the paint off of the clock and into some little container and slowly building up your stockpile.
- [25:37]
Phoebe Judge
David spent a weekend scraping clocks with a screwdriver, but he only ended up with a small pile of paint chips. So he had to give up on radium and look for something else to use. He settled on an element called americium.
- [25:53]
Ken Silverstein
You can get americium. I think you still can, although I'm not sure. But back in the day, smoke detectors contained a little chip of americium.
- [26:03]
Phoebe Judge
David had stolen a few smoke detectors from his boy scout camp, but he would need a lot more. One day, he heard that a local business was selling damaged merchandise, including smoke detectors, at a discount, but they only had a few dozen. Then he found out that smoke alarm companies will sell expired detectors directly to buyers. So he wrote to one of them saying he was working on a school project and got about 100 smoke detectors for a dollar each.
- [26:34]
Ken Silverstein
Initially, he was getting all of the material shipped to his father's house and there'd be just boxes and boxes coming. But he told, you know, he told them the same thing. It's just for this, you know, it's for his high school science class.
- [26:48]
Phoebe Judge
He figured out where to actually find the americium in the smoke detectors by writing to a smoke detector manufacturer. A customer service representative told him exactly where it was located. Sealed in a protective cover, David used pliers to pry it out. Once he had a pile of tiny chips of americium, he put on a paper hospital mask and welded them all together with a blowtorch. David was finally ready to put together his neutron gun, but he still really wanted to use radium. He'd always go into an antique store if he saw one.
- [27:27]
Ken Silverstein
So one day he has his Geiger counter, and he walks into an antique store, and the Geiger counter just, like, goes off. And he was very excited because he knew somewhere in that store that he knew he had hit a gold mine of radium, a radium mine. And it turned out he, you know, the Geiger counter led him to a table clock, and it had a tinted green dial. And after haggling over the price with the owner, he bought it. And when he took it home, what had triggered the Geiger counter was that there was, you know, in these old clocks, there was always a little tiny door in the side. If you needed to wind up the clock, there was, like a little key you'd use to wind up these clocks. So there was this little door where you could do that. But when David opened up that little door, there was a little bottle of radium paint. He never had a score like that. I mean, this was like, you know, robbing a bank. This was beyond David's wildest dreams.
- [28:38]
Phoebe Judge
David put together a neutron gun with the radium. And when he was done, he put the gun on the floor of the potting shed and aimed it at the thorium. He covered the whole thing with a sheet of lead. And then he waited. He'd do his homework or watch TV for hours, then come back to check whether anything was happening with his Geiger counter.
- [29:00]
Ken Silverstein
But it wasn't working.
- [29:03]
Phoebe Judge
So David wrote to his pen pal at the Department of Energy, Donald Erb, to see if he knew what was going wrong. He presented it as a hypothetical problem, but Donald Erb had a very practical solution. Erb wrote back to tell David that the neutrons coming out of his gun were too fast and that the Manhattan Project scientists had come across this problem too. David would need a filter to slow the neutrons down. He could use water or an isotope called tritium.
- [29:37]
Ken Silverstein
Well, David didn't want to do water. He didn't want ping pong balls or tennis cans. He didn't want to do anything the easy way. So he looked into his options, and what he found were glow in the dark gun and bow sights, which had small amounts. It was a waxy substance inside the gannon or bosite, and they contained a tiny quantity of tritium. So he started, you know, conniving ways to obtain these gun sites.
- [30:11]
Phoebe Judge
He started ordering them from catalogs, scraping off the tritium and returning them, claiming the sites were defective. He wore dishwashing gloves and used a wooden coffee stirrer to scrape off the tritium and, and kept what he got in an old perfume bottle.
- [30:28]
Ken Silverstein
And after doing all of this, he creates this filter to slow down the neutrons. And he's monitoring, he's always monitoring with his Geiger counter. And he's very happy because this powder is becoming more radioactive by the day.
- [30:47]
Phoebe Judge
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- [32:04]
Ken Silverstein
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- [32:30]
Phoebe Judge
By the end of the school year in 1994, David Hahn had everything he needed to put together his breeder reactor.
- [32:38]
Ken Silverstein
He takes all of this and he, you know, after he realizes, hey, this is becoming more radioactive, he took these powders, ash, and he creates foil wrapped cubes filled with these and then puts them together. And you know, again, we're not talking about a sophisticated lab at all. I mean, he uses duct tape as part of the process of holding them all together. But it's the core, it's the pulsing nuclear core of his Bruger reactor. And he told me that he was at the lab out in Gulf Manor and monitoring with his Geiger counter this nuclear core. And he said it was radioactive as heck. He said the level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time that he put the core together. When he assembled these cubes into the core of the reactor and he said, I know that some of the reactions that go on a breeder reactor were going on to a minute extent with his, you know, little model core reactor.
- [33:51]
Phoebe Judge
He must have been excited that it was working.
- [33:54]
Ken Silverstein
He was thrilled. He was ecstatic. He did become concerned as his Geiger counter was showing that he wasn't just picking up the signs of radiation inside the potting shed or in the backyard, but down the street from his mother's.
- [34:12]
Phoebe Judge
House around this time. He Came across the story of the women who had become sick and died after working with the radium infused paint that he'd scraped off of clogs. He later said, I knew in theory that radium could be dangerous, but I'd never read about what had happened to people who handled it. I was pretty much scared to death.
- [34:34]
Ken Silverstein
And he decides he needs to shut down the backyard potting shed and figure out what to do going forward. You know, he wasn't going to give up, but he realized, ooh, this is maybe dangerous to the neighbors. So he packs up his things, he packs up his raw material, his radioactive elements again. He was keeping the material out in the shed in shoeboxes and stuff like this. And he throws it into the back of his Pontiac in a toolbox and he locked it with a padlock and he sealed it with duct tape. And as he was planning what to do, he was driving around in his Pontiac with all of his materials. You know, the mercury switches, thorium, americium, and then the equipment that he had all, you know, he had everything in the trunk and thrown into this toolbox as he planned his next steps. And what happened, what is known for certain, is that because there's a Police report At 2:40am on August 31, 1994, the police in Clinton Township, that's his father and stepmother's neighborhood, got a call about a young man in a residential neighborhood who was reportedly stealing tires from a car. So the police arrive at the scene and they find David. And he says, I'm just waiting to meet a friend. And, you know, it's 2:40 in the morning. He doesn't provide much information. So the officers are not convinced. So they searched his car and they discovered the toolbox. And there is stuff thrown about the trunk, as you know as well, that alarms them. There's some of the foil wrapped cubes with gray powder. There's mercury switches, clock faces, fireworks, vacuum tubes, you know, equipment and strange material. So the police fear that maybe David is building a new atomic bomb, a nuclear bomb. And you know, they panic and they decide to take David in. They question him and they tow his car to police headquarters in Clinton Township, which they had to do something. But this wasn't like the greatest idea because they realized soon after getting it to the police station that, you know, the police report said that they had discovered a potential improvised explosive device. And now they've towed it out front of the police headquarters. It's 6:30 in the morning and they're like, oh, well, if this is maybe we should really try to determine what this is because this could blow up police headquarters in half the town. And so they call in the bomb squad. And there was sort of good news and bad news. The good news was that the toolbox wasn't an atomic bomb. So that's a big relief. On the other hand, the bad news was that the car, the trunk of the car and the material they found was radioactive.
- [38:04]
Phoebe Judge
One of the official reports stated that there were levels of thorium that were, quote, not found in nature, at least not in Michigan.
- [38:13]
Ken Silverstein
And that triggered alarms, obviously. And so the bomb squad and the local cops contact the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan officials and state officials about what the hell do we do? I mean, this is not a normal situation. We don't know what to do. They're on the phone with state and federal officials, the local cops, and the bomb squad with the Department of Energy, the epa, the FBI, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Look, it's the crisis. What do we do?
- [38:48]
Phoebe Judge
What the police had found in David's trunk had set into motion something called the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan. It was originally put together after the Three Mile island nuclear reactor accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Cleanup took 14 years and cost about a billion dollars. The response plan was designed to help the government respond to a peacetime radiological emergency. The public could be instructed to stay inside and turn off any heating or air conditioning. A rumor control center could be set up to field questions and communicate with the press. The first step of the plan in David Hahn's case was to confirm that there weren't any radioactive materials anywhere but the trunk of David's car.
- [39:41]
Ken Silverstein
David didn't tell them much, and he gave them his first father's address, which was quite clever. He didn't say anything about his mother's house or the potting shed out there, which he'd taken most of the stuff out of. But that's, you know, that was the danger from David's point of view is that the cops would go out to his mother's house. So he gives him the father's address and they don't find anything, you know, and so they're like, okay, we've got everything and it's not gonna be anything beyond this.
- [40:09]
Phoebe Judge
David was released from custody, but the head of the radiological division at the Michigan Department of Public Health still had questions about what the 17 year old was working on. He scheduled an interview with David, but it had to be postponed when another emergency came up about three months later on Thanksgiving Day, he finally called David. David told him he'd been very careful with the thorium and that he'd been working with it to earn Eagle Scout status. When he called David again a few days later to follow up, he was told that David was at his mother's house. No one had known about his mother's house or the potting shed. The expert from the Department of Health got the number and called David at the house at Gulf Manor right away.
- [41:01]
Ken Silverstein
And he confesses, well, yeah, I didn't tell you everything. I didn't probably should have told you about the backyard lab out at my mom's house. And they're like, oh, shit. A few days later, a team goes out to survey the scene at his mother's house. So that's when they discover he hadn't quite packed up everything. The potting sheds had all sorts of crazy stuff out there. Like, not all of it was alarming. You know, aluminum pie pans and Pyrex cups and milk crates. But then there was other stuff around that was like, you know, that wouldn't have been alarming in isolation. But then they, you know, they know already that David's accumulated these radioactive materials. And future Reports describes excessive levels of radioactive material. To take one example, there was a vegetable can that they measured for radiation, and they found it registered at 50,000 counts per minute. That's the count of a radiation level which was 1000 times higher than normal levels of background radiation.
- [42:20]
Phoebe Judge
The state experts padlocked the shed and reached out to the federal government to ask for help. An Environmental Protection Agency official later said that he was shocked when he heard about what David had. And that quote, it was some of the highest concentrated material that we'd encountered in private hands. The EPA sent over a team of experts dressed in moon suits.
- [42:45]
Ken Silverstein
They were there to do a cleanup under the Superfund act, where the EPA was clean up low level to high level radioactive sites if it posed a health hazard or environmental hazard.
- [43:00]
Phoebe Judge
They packed everything up, including the walls of the potting shed, and put it all in the steel drums marked as radioactive. There were 39 of them, and they were all sent to a special dump site for radioactive materials in Utah. But a lot of the most dangerous stuff was already gone. When David realized authorities were paying attention and that the EPA might be coming. He told his mother and her boyfriend they were afraid of losing their house, and so they started throwing David's things away in the household trash, including the radium. It ended up in the local landfill. David's father and stepmother grounded him for two weeks and took his car keys and they told him that he had to stop his experiments.
- [43:50]
Ken Silverstein
His extraordinary accomplishments weren't really recognized. They were he was seen as a menace, a danger. Also, you know, some of the kids at the high school started calling him Radioactive Boy.
- [44:03]
Phoebe Judge
Once David's girlfriend tried to send him balloons at their high school for Valentine's.
- [44:07]
Ken Silverstein
Day and the high school principal thought, oh my God, the balloons are filled with chemical gases. David has done something insane again. And the balloons were seized. And then the Scout leaders initially told him they were going to deny him Eagle Scout status, which he had earned in a rather unorthodox way, you know, saying that his merit badge project had endangered the town.
- [44:35]
Phoebe Judge
But in the end they did let him become an Eagle Scout. After David graduated from high school, he went to community college and majored in metallurgy, but he left before graduating and joined the Navy. He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia on the USS Enterprise, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but he worked on the deck and in the kitchen and wasn't even allowed to tour the ship's reactors. He had initially refused any medical tests to determine whether his time in the potting shed had done any damage, but he eventually did get checked out and doctors didn't find anything that indicated that the radiation exposure had hurt David. Ken Silverstein interviewed David for years for his book the Radioactive Boy scout. David died 12 years after it came out of unrelated causes in 2004, a 10 year old named Taylor Wilson was given a book by his grandmother that inspired him to build a nuclear fusion reactor when he was 14. The book was about David Hahn. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie's A Gift Rico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them@thisiscriminal.com and you can sign up for our newsletter@thisiscriminal.com Newsletter we hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program Criminal. Plus you can listen to Criminal this is Love and Phoebe reads a mystery without any ads. Plus you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co creator Lauren Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com criminal we're on Facebook at thisisCriminal and Instagram and TikTok at CriminalPodcast. We're also on YouTube at YouTube.com CriminalPodcast Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast network. Discover more great shows@podcast.voxmedia.com I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. As marketing channels have multiplied, the demand for content has skyrocketed. But everyone can make content that's on brand and stands out. With Adobe Express, you don't have to be a designer to generate images, rewrite text, and create effects. That's the beauty of generative AI that's commercially safe. Teams all across your business will be psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations, videos, social posts, flyers and more. Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on brand content. Learn more@adobe.com Express Business.