Narrator (2:37)
A warning. This episode discusses youth, depression, and suicide. These topics may be distressing for some listeners. As we noted in the last episode, Glenna Hott was different than the other victims in this story. Yes, Glenna, a dog trainer and bartender who'd come to Kirksville for a new life, interacted with Brandon Grossheim before her death, just like the members of the Kirksville suicide cluster. But she didn't die by suicide. Instead, in July 2017, she died of a ruptured liver, having basically drank herself to death. She was 29. She died in the apartment of her ex boyfriend, a guy named Cody Robbins. Cody wasn't there at the time, and they were no longer dating, but the stress of this tragedy had to be overwhelming. Before long, he moved out of the apartment. It was understandable, certainly, that he was shaken up after Glenna's death. Something like that would be enough to rattle anybody. Still, his neighbors were sad to see him go. They all lived in an apartment complex known as the Journal Building, and he was a big part of the social circle there. The Journal Building was a pretty wild place to live, and Cody and his friends, including Brandon Grossheim, partied hard. They blasted music. Things got crazy. The small Kirksville bar scene was right across the street, and so the Journal Building could be like pre game and post game party central. But the Journal Building had seen two recent deaths. The suicide of Alex Vogt and the death of Glenna Hott. Now, with Cody leaving, the party was truly coming to an end. And so before Cody moved out, he had a bunch of friends sign a card for him. It was actually a big piece of white tag board, and his friends left all sorts of funny and inspirational messages on it. There's a peace symbol, an anarchy symbol, and even a quote from Tupac. Even though you're fed up, keep your head up. It was also signed by Brandon Grossheim, whose message raised some eyebrows with police because in it he referred to himself as the Die Master. As in Die Master. Here again is Brandon talking about it with the Kirksville pd. Second photo I want to show you. This was a picture of like a. Almost like a poster board or a wall board or something. I'm gonna circle the parts that they want me to ask you about. You signed your name Brandon G. And it says Die Master. Yeah, Die Master is Beer Dye Master. It's a beer drinking game. Oh, okay. Never heard of it. I guess maybe that shows my age, but it's really Popular at Akla. I know other fraternities have their own variations of it. Okay, so just a beer drinking game, and obviously you were pretty good at it, but they're calling you the Master. I mean, it's all about hands on information and throw a die up to a certain height, sauce through the ceiling lamp on the other side of the table if you cup somebody drink. Now, as Brandon claimed to the police, dye Master was a cheeky nickname, referring to his prowess in a fraternity drinking game and not to anything sinister. But the fact remained that Brandon still had plenty of explaining to do when it came to the Journal Building tragedies. In this apartment that Cody was moving out of, two people had died. When it came to the first, Alex Vogt, who killed himself in January 2017, Brandon was one of the last people to see him alive. In fact, Brandon let the police into the building when they arrived on the scene. When it came to the second death of Glenna Haut, Brandon was the very last person to see her alive. As you heard in the last episode, he faced a battery of questions from police about the fact that she was found nearly naked, that he had scratches on his body, and the fact that he refused to submit to a DNA test. There's all sorts of outstanding questions when it comes to both of these deaths. And so today we're going to focus on the Journal Building, the off campus apartments where the death sentence happened. What was it about this place? And how was it that Brandon Grossheim was able to maintain his corrosive influence there? This podcast series tells the story of the most infamous suicide cluster in American history. It's a production of iHeart podcasts and cool Fire Studios. I'm your host, Ben Westoff, along with Ryan Krul. This is the Peacemaker. Producer. Ryan and I wanted to visit the Journal Building to better understand the environment these young people were living in. But we couldn't exactly just go barging in. And so Ryan and I got in touch with a guy who used to live there named Dalton McVeigh. Dalton McVeigh is a character. I love this guy. He's quirky, and he also has some serious six degrees of Kevin Bacon connections to people in this story. A lot of them. He's a former roommate of Brandon Grosseim, and they also work together at the local pizza place. Not only did Dalton used to live in the Journal Building, he was also a member of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity, which was, of course, where three of the victims killed themselves. So to some extent, Dalton was in the middle of all of this while it was going down. He's a thoughtful guy, clearly very smart, but he also says some things that might throw you for a loop. Like what he said on our walk over to the Journal Building after I told him I'd gone running at a local spot called Thousand Hills Park. It's beautiful, but the trail is kind of punishing.
