The Civil War False Flag

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On October 14th, 2017, the Battle of Cedar Creek was happening all over again.

Originally fought on October 19th, 1864, the crushing defeat meant Confederate troops could no longer maneuver through the Shenandoah Valley to march on Washington, and the Union victory was a last-minute boost for Lincoln's re-election campaign.

153 years later, as reenactors in Middletown, Virginia milled around in their historically accurate wool uniforms and replica weaponry waiting for the battle to begin, one of them found an alarming anachronism in the Suttler's tent.

A pipe bomb.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation has held their annual reenactment of the battle since 1990.

But 2017 was a politically fraught time in America.

On August 12, 2017, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended when a young rally attendee who kept a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on his nightstand ran his car through a crowd of peaceful protesters marching on a closed street.

He injured dozens and killed Heather Heyer.

Images of the crowd that day with rally attendees carrying Confederate flags and swastikas side by side flooded the national consciousness.

Most Americans heard the word Antifa for the first time that week.

The national conversation about Confederate monuments, which had been simmering all year, boiled over.

The city council in Baltimore, Maryland voted to remove their Confederate statues just two days later.

The same week, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky asked his city council to approve the removal of the statues at their courthouse.

The Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in L.A.

was removed overnight.

From Florida to California, Confederate monuments were removed, toppled, and vandalized.

No one wanted to be the next Charlottesville.

Six days after the rally, officials in Manassas, a small city outside of D.C.

about two hours north of Charlottesville, announced they were calling off the annual Civil War reenactment weekend scheduled for the end of August.

The Washington Post reported that the reenactors themselves were worried the, quote, racially charged atmosphere around the country over whether to remove Civil War monuments would lead to violence.

So the concern was not whether it was appropriate to continue celebrating the Confederacy in the wake of the deadly rally, but rather anxiety about the possibility that Antifa, America's new black-clad boogeyman, would target these events.

And these growing fears of persecution from the radical left were confirmed on September 23rd when the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation received an ominous letter in the mail.

Instead of a return address, the envelope bore a symbol that was fresh in their minds: a black circle containing a black flag, overlaying a red flag.

It was from Antifa.

The letter inside read: reads, You need to cancel your coming up

then we have no choice but to come and protest.

We will come and disrupt and cause problems for all those who attend this atrocity of history.

Several hundred of our supporters will attend and slash tires, block traffic, harass patrons, and reenactors.

We will make Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic.

Many of us have dogs, so we'll bring dog feces to throw on people.

We will also throw cups of human urine.

We might resort to actually firing guns into the camps and at the reenactors.

We will put poison in the water.

We will use noise to disrupt the battles and sleep.

These events must stop.

Our local organizer tells us he is ready to go.

You have been warned.

Now, if it is not called off, we will destroy you.

You have less than one month to issue a cancellation notice.

Do it ASAP.

Days before the event in October, the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation did announce publicly that they had received a threatening letter, but that the event would go on with increased security.

And the details of the threat were not released, but speculation immediately turned to the Culture War.

And after the bomb was discovered, the National Review wrote, The simplest and most logical explanation is that this is a new, violent extension of the effort to remove Confederate statues.

The Federalists lamented that history itself was becoming another casualty in the Culture War.

The threatening letters continued for over a year, becoming increasingly gruesome and terrifyingly specific, targeting members of the board at Cedar Creek and their family members.

Cedar Creek had to cancel the reenactment in 2018.

After one director of the foundation resigned in fear for his family's safety when the letter writer threatened to put a bomb under his mother's car, the new director started getting threats of sexual violence against her young daughters.

The mayor of Gettysburg received a letter threatening to bomb the annual Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade.

Would Antifa stop at nothing to destroy history?

But it wasn't Antifa.

It wasn't Antifa at all.

It was Gerald.

Gerald Leonard Drake, born in 1958 in Michigan, loves the Civil War.

In 1996, his hometown paper, the Port Huron Times-Herald, wrote an article about his dedication to reenactment.

He'd gotten a second job to save up the $10,000 it would cost him to transport Judith, his 525-pound replica Civil War cannon, from Michigan to Columbus, Georgia for the Chattahoochee Heritage Festival.

Judith, the cannon, was named after his wife, Judy, who would file for divorce the following year.

When he married his third wife, Donna, in 2010, they took wedding photos in Civil War-era dress at the historic Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg.

They got two cats and named them Shiloh and Musket.

But the world was changing.

The world of 1860 falls further away every day, no matter how historically accurate the brass buttons on your coat are.

In 2011, he posted a thread on a Civil War reenactment forum about a living history event he'd recently participated in.

A tour group was appalled that the reenactors, role-playing as soldiers reading aloud letters from home, read a letter describing the brutal whipping of an enslaved person that was riddled with racial slurs.

Though he felt that the event itself went well, he wrote that shit hit the fan afterwards and the liberals in the group had a bitch session about appropriate language.

I guess what I'm asking here is, as living historians and reenactors, Aren't we supposed to do as good of a job and impression of our ancestors as we possibly can?

We used to get praise and accolades for doing a great first-person impression.

Let me know if anyone else is having this kind of trouble for being the best you can be.

Surprisingly, even in 2011, fellow users on the Civil War Message Board disagreed with Gerald.

Their reenactment groups, as committed as they were to historical accuracy, did not use the N-word.

One user whose profile bears the badge for member of the year wrote that he is, quote, careful to avoid certain language and terms, always realizing that my performance is in the present century to modern day folks who live in the present and would not understand the customs, practices, and language of the 19th century with any real clarity.

Another user, a former moderator of the forum, replied to a comment from Drake that he was looking for a less PC group, wrote that he can't imagine there is any group out there that would condone that kind of language, and all this achieves is bad publicity for reenactors, adding that those tourists surely all went home that day and told their friends about the racists they saw at the event.

A year later, Drake posted again in the same Civil War forum, complaining that people are getting too hung up on safety, writing, remember when reenacting used to be fun?

And mourning the old days when battle reenactments were more like real battle.

Again, fellow reenactors pushed back, with one veteran reenactor writing that, He did indeed remember those days.

He'd once had a costume ruined and gotten pretty serious burns when another reenactor shot him with a replica shotgun.

Even in his chosen community of Civil War reenactors, Gerald was living in a version of the past that was becoming increasingly lonely.

In October of 2014, things really started to fall apart.

His third marriage was on the rocks.

And after what sounds like a pretty petty dispute, Gerald was kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit.

As a volunteer at the Cedar Creek battlefield, he'd heard a rumor that someone was planning to sneak into the reenactment without paying the registration fee.

Gerald and his friend and fellow reenactor, Daryl, found this to be an outrageous offense and decided to print up flyers letting everyone know that Duffy Miller wasn't going to pay his entry fee and anyone who sees him should stop him.

Duffy Miller, as it turns out, was their unit commander, and he was not pleased to see the posters.

He kicks Gerald and Daryl out of the unit.

Gerald continued volunteering at Cedar Creek, but it seems this incident was the end of his love for reenacting.

Now, I can't find exactly how much it costs to register for the event in 2014, but the 2024 registration fee is $35, and I know from the forum post that this has actually been increased in the last couple of years to cover the new security measures that they have to have.

So I have to assume it was much less 10 years ago.

So the inciting incident for this entire debacle was a couple of old guys fighting about 20 bucks and the sanctity of Confederate reenactment, I guess.

So, what's a guy to do now?

First, they stopped letting him say the N-word.

You're not even allowed to shoot each other anymore.

And now he's kicked out of his unit entirely?

A hobby he'd loved since the early 90s was being ruined.

They weren't saying like wokeness back then, but I think if this happened today, Gerald would say that it was being ruined by woke.

He'd been left by three wives and now his own Civil War unit didn't want him around.

But he continued volunteering at Cedar Creek.

He retired.

He built and painted little models.

He got into model rockets.

He traveled the world.

And he posted a lot.

And apparently he held on to his anger about that incident at the 2014 Cedar Creek reenactment.

I spent a lot of time combing through hundreds of pages of court documents, years and years of his posts on forums, but I can't quite sort out what the catalyst was in 2017.

Why did he wait three years to put that bomb at Cedar Creek?

Maybe he saw the news about the Manassas reenactment getting canceled out of fear of political violence in the wake of Unite the Right and just got an idea.

Because within weeks of that news story, Gerald started writing letters.

After his first letter to the Cedar Creek Creek Battlefield Foundation in September, he followed up by placing an actual bomb at the event in October.

The reenactment community is pretty small, and the pipe bomb was big news.

But a rumor was going around on Facebook that a teenager had been arrested for the original letter, and then that was sort of conflated as, you know, people are posting and reposting and talking about the post that they saw.

It was conflated to the idea that someone had been arrested for the bomb.

And the rumor was very quickly disproven.

No one was arrested for placing the bomb in the vendor's tent.

But the letter writer was frustrated.

If they thought the culprit had been apprehended, they wouldn't be afraid anymore.

John Bucheister, a vendor at the event who told a reporter that he was present when the bomb was found, was one of the posters in that Facebook rumor mill.

And there's nothing malicious here.

He just reposted something that someone else had said that the would-be bomber had been apprehended.

I think there was a lot of relief in believing that.

So a lot of people were posting it.

But I guess our letter writer saw John Bucheister's post, because on November 13th, 2017, he opened a letter addressed to his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Like the first letter, the envelope was printed with the Antifa symbol in place of a return address.

Inside, a typed letter read,

Thank you so much for putting on Facebook that a teenager was arrested for the threat to Cedar Creek.

It was so much easier to bring in a bomb.

Do something like this again for us?

We are coming to the Gettysburg Parade End speech.

Thank you again for all your help in the last terror event.

That same week, a local newspaper in Gettysburg received a letter threatening the upcoming Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade.

The letter threatened to drive trucks through the crowd at the parade, a troubling callback to the still recent vehicular murder at Unite the Right,

and threatened to put sharpshooters in windows and on rooftops.

The letter writer ended the note by giving a detailed description of the bomb at Cedar Creek, quote, for proof that we did the Cedar Creek terror attack.

But just as Cedar Creek had not canceled when they were threatened, the Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade was not canceled that year.

But the route was significantly shortened to allow for a heavy police presence.

S.

Chris Anders, a Republican political activist, wrote on Facebook, Apparently, Antifa and other hate groups are headed to try and cause problems this Saturday at the annual Remembrance Day parade.

But he wrote that he would be marching with his brothers in gray rather than giving in to terrorists.

There are nearly 100 comments on this Facebook post, mostly agreeing that Antifa must be stopped or offering questionable safety tips, like advising that you should use a wool scarf to protect yourself from tear gas.

I have to assume that would only make things worse.

I feel like wool is very absorbent.

But one lone commenter, a reenactor from New England who rides with the 1st Main Cavalry, had a different theory.

He wrote,

I bet you $5 that the perpetrator is a reenactor or former reenactor.

No offense to anyone, but no one knows about Rem Day beyond reenactors and locals.

For it to be a target, someone would have to be aware of it.

And there are plenty of other high-profile, low-security events with bigger crowd numbers to choose from.

His comment drew ire from the victimized Confederates obsessed with the idea of a massive conspiracy from the radical left.

He was, of course, correct.

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And now here's where things start to get really weird.

Just some truly inexplicable behavior with deep, weird roots.

I mean, I guess that's the show, right?

This guy's weird, but here's where it takes its super weird turn.

Gerald is retired at this point.

And when he's not traveling, he's volunteering.

He's still volunteering at Cedar Creek, even though he doesn't reenact anymore, but he's also volunteering at Sky Meadows State Park.

It's not entirely clear why a registered sex offender was allowed to volunteer at the state park alongside a high school student, but that's what it says in the affidavit, so I guess that one fell through the cracks at Sky Meadows.

Because while he did successfully petition to get himself removed from the sex offender registry in 2021, in 2018, the background check required for volunteers at state parks would have shown that he was a registered sex offender for a 2004 conviction in Ohio for sexual imposition and child endangerment.

And again, I'll be so clear with you right up front, there's no allegation that Drake was involved in any inappropriate sexual conduct as a volunteer anywhere.

Not at the state park, not anywhere.

So in the time period of these events, there's no allegation that he's touching any children or engaging in any inappropriate sexual conduct.

But I'm not just telling you he's a registered sex offender to sort of point and laugh at that as a circumstance.

These things intersect.

So in 2018, he's volunteering at the park with this teenage boy.

And one afternoon in February, they're volunteering together.

They're shooting the shit, filling the time.

And Gerald, who is 60 at this point, is telling this teenage boy about his hobby of Civil War reenactment, which is very tragically in decline.

The topic of the 2017 reenactment at Cedar Creek comes up.

I have to assume Gerald brought it up because why would the 17-year-old boy have brought that up?

But Gerald is telling the kid about some funny articles about that 2017 event.

He later emailed the teenager what appeared to be photographs of newspaper clippings about the bombing.

But in these articles, the bomb went off.

The articles he emails this teenager contain details of the bomb actually killing people.

with more deaths caused by subsequent sniper fire.

But we know the bomb didn't really go off.

No one got shot.

No one got hurt.

Nothing really happened.

The articles he showed his young friend were completely fake.

The federal agents investigating the case wrote that attempts to locate sources for these fake newspaper clippings turned up nothing.

I mean, not even anything online showing these fake articles.

There's nothing.

There's nothing.

He must have made them himself.

And that's where his sex offender status ties back in.

In 2003, he was indicted in Auglays County, Ohio for gross sexual imposition.

And shortly after he's indicted, someone starts sending weird letters to the Auglaise County prosecutor.

The letters were made to appear as though they were sent by a member of the police department in Drake's hometown of Port Huron, Michigan.

And they appeared to prove that Drake's second wife was a child abuser.

The letter writer sent a forged polygraph report on Michigan State Police Letterhead and a forged notarized statement from Drake's estranged wife.

And when his home was eventually searched, police found a doctored page from the local newspaper.

He had taken an actual newspaper and manually altered it with a false news story about his estranged second wife, Susan, pleading guilty to child abuse and endangerment.

No such news story ever existed, and I can find no evidence that Susan was ever charged with such a crime.

Maybe a more thorough journalist would have pushed harder for the details here, here, but court cases involving sexual abuse of a minor tend to be completely closed.

Those documents are sealed.

Unless someone was sitting in those hearings and there's local news reports about the testimony, you're just, you're not going to find it.

And short of reaching out to the parties involved, there's no way for me to know exactly what led to Gerald Drake being convicted of sexual imposition and child endangerment, or why he tried to frame his estranged wife for it.

But I can tell you that after his conviction, there's a note on the docket that the judge prohibited Drake from contacting his second ex-wife and her minor daughter from a prior marriage.

So I think we can get the gist of the situation without me asking a young woman why her stepdad, a man now in prison for making a bomb, was court-ordered to stay away from her when she was 10.

Take from that what you will.

The relevant kernel of that story, though, is those fake newspaper articles.

In 2003, he's manually cutting and pasting by hand and Xeroxing his creations to disguise the alterations.

He's arts and craftsing his way into an alternate reality where his ex-wife is the one endangering children, not him.

And in 2018 he's doing it again.

He's making fake newspaper clippings about what he wishes were real.

He's showing this teenage boy a reality where the bomb did go off.

and the people who snubbed him died.

And while he was in jail for that sex offense, a short eight months in an Ohio County jail, he made another art project of sorts.

In September 2004, the Auglaise County Sheriff's Office reached out to the FBI Field Office in Cleveland.

Gerald had been trying to make friends in jail by showing off his knowledge of explosives.

He produced eight pages of hand-drawn diagrams and instructions for creating a pipe bomb, a CO2 cartridge bomb, a Coleman fuel bomb, a propane tank bomb, and diagrams about how to modify the kind of inert grenades you can buy as antiques or at the Army surplus store, and how to turn them back into live grenades.

And the diagram of the pipe bomb he drew in jail in 2004 is remarkably similar to the device he made in 2017.

It doesn't appear that anything ever came of the incident in the jail back in 2004.

You know, the sheriff's office contacted the FBI and they said, hey, we've got these weird drawings.

What do you guys think about this?

There's no indication that there was follow-up from there.

But apparently they held on to them.

Those drawings remained in a filing cabinet somewhere in Ohio for 20 years.

It's kind of surprising that they still had those drawings in 2019, but they are included in the affidavit for the search warrant.

So in the spring of 2018, he seems pretty content with his hobbies.

He's making fake newspaper articles about his bomb going off and showing them to a kid he volunteers with.

Based on his eBay review history, he's painting miniature models of Godzilla and Frankenstein, both five stars from Gerald.

And he's getting into model rocketry.

In March, he took a solo vacation to Amsterdam.

His TripAdvisor account provides a pretty robust log of his travels.

He wasn't a big fan of the Jewish History Museum, titling his review, Not Really for Gentiles.

and writing that he felt shorted by the lack of artifacts from the death camps at the Holocaust Museum.

He felt that it had been, quote, scrubbed of shock due to the new PC way all museums are going.

He felt the same way about the Dutch Resistance Museum, writing, if you were looking for the story of the full account of atrocities done on the citizens, well, this display doesn't have it.

It, like many museums today, have had to lighten up on their truth so as not to offend anyone.

He did, however, really enjoy the Museum of Prostitution and his visit to the Red Light District.

In a later post on a forum for sex doll owners, he boasted that he is familiar with the female condoms he uses to keep his dolls clean because he's used them in European brothels.

And for what it's worth, the Anne Frank House got his seal of approval as a World War II history buff.

He loved the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, and he was deeply upset that his hostel did not provide a traditional American breakfast with, quote, hot meats.

I don't know why he would expect a cheap hostel in Amsterdam to have American breakfast, but he was not satisfied.

And just as an aside about his trip advisor reviews, that was my favorite thing about researching this.

He loves to review.

The cell site location data in one of the search warrant affidavits shows that he likely dropped off that very first threat letter at a USPS dropbox in a strip mall near the Dulles Airport just before boarding an Air France flight from DC to Madrid on September 21st, 2017.

So while his letter threatening to throw piss and shit at Civil War reenactors was making its way to Cedar Creek, he was on his way to Spain.

He hated the bullfighting, but he raved about the Burger King on Plaza de Castilla.

Apparently the Burger King at home is always getting his order wrong.

He had to go all the way to Spain to get his whopper with no onions and no pickles.

The Burger King in his hometown only gets four stars from Gerald.

And since visiting Italy in April 2017, he rated four different Italian restaurants in Winchester, Virginia, based on how the the pizza measures up to the pizza in Rome.

He's given out two just like Rome's, and two were failures, according to Gerald.

So maybe he's done.

Maybe it's out of his system.

Three threatening letters and one bomb that didn't go off and then he's back to his hobbies.

But on June 19, 2018, his local newspaper ran a story about the upcoming reenactment at Cedar Creek.

The event was just four months away and the board of directors wanted everyone to know that the reenactment weekend would have additional security after the incident the year before.

Days after the paper ran that story, a pair of identical letters were mailed to the newspaper, the Winchester Star, and the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation.

Like the first letters, the envelopes had a symbol where the return address should be, but for some reason these letters had a version of the anti-fascist symbol with the red flag on top and the black flag behind, which is reversed from the original letters.

I think he probably just downloaded a new image and didn't notice that it was different.

I don't think he realized he was signaling a preference for anarchism over communism or vice versa.

You know, both versions of that symbol exist and are perfectly real and valid and are used by different people, but they are in fact different symbols and do mean something slightly different.

I don't think Gerald knew that.

And this time, both letters were addressed to Joe Derezzo, the president of the Foundation's board.

And they threatened to kill his mother with a car bomb if he didn't call off the reenactment in October.

Derezzo later told agents that he took the the threat seriously enough that he began checking underneath his mother's car for explosive devices.

But the language in the letters was odd and oddly specific.

Though the Winchester Star article didn't actually mention what those increased security measures would be, the letter writers seemed to know.

One of the private discussions the board had was about banning spectators from bringing bags of any kind to the event.

But they were worried that this would be an issue for people like parents with diaper bags.

The letter writer said there were, quote, many ways for us to sneak in a surprise, specifically mentioning putting a bomb inside of a diaper bag.

And the board had also quietly been in contact with the local sheriff's office about providing metal detectors.

And the letter writer seemed to know this too, boasting that he'd already outsmarted their security.

We now have plastic bombs, so metal detectors are useless.

We have found a man that's going to pose as an enactor, to drive in some kind of fertilizer bomb.

We have coolers, thermoses, water bottles all made into small IEDs.

And in the completely real and very serious way that real Antifa terror cells sign off their terrorism threat letters, the letter writer explained why the bomb didn't work in 2017.

We are the ones that did it to you last year.

We used a bad bomb guy whose mercury switch and rocket launch wire didn't work on the pipe bomb covered in nuts.

Just so you know we are real and returning.

Yeah, just so you know we're real, okay?

It's such a weird mess, but silly or not, the letter's recipient was terrified.

They were threatening to blow up his mom.

And there really was a real bomb the year before, so you know he's not bluffing.

You already know he really can build a bomb.

So you can't laugh it off while it's happening.

But in hindsight, like, what a goofy ass sign-off.

Just so you know, we had a bad bomb guy last year, but we're very real and we fixed that, okay?

We're real.

A sixth letter, the third in this second batch, was sent to John Bucheister, that vendor in Pennsylvania who had spoken to the media about being there when the bomb was discovered in 2017.

He'd gotten a letter in the first batch too, thanking him for spreading that rumor that someone had been arrested for placing the bomb.

Confusingly, the letter he got in July 2018 was addressed to Joe, just like the letter sent to Joe DeRezzo the same week.

And it seemed to be speaking to Joe Derezzo, asking for him to call off the event, which presumably Derezzo could do as president of the board.

But John Bucheister is just a guy in Pennsylvania who sells antiques and Civil War reproductions.

This letter, like the others, threatened to kill Derezzo's mother.

Since we can't can't seem to get you to stop this celebration of a war to keep men in chains, maybe if we go after your volunteers that help out, you will stop this.

I like the idea of burning your mother alive in a car bomb.

Days after these letters were received, the foundation announced on July 3rd, 2018, they were calling off the reenactment in October.

You know, they got that letter in 2017 and they decided, we're going to soldier on, we're going to have the event.

And then there was a real bomb.

People were really in danger.

So when they got this second set of letters in the middle of 2018, they decided, we got to call it off.

It's not safe.

What if the bomb goes off this year?

We know this guy's not bluffing.

We know he got a bomb in the tent last year.

We can't risk it.

And on the Civil War Talk Forum, that online forum where Gerald's been posting for years, reactions were mixed.

A lot of users agreed that it was the right thing to do.

It's just not worth the risk.

People bring their children, their families.

Others didn't think it was right to let the terrorists win, with one poster noting that he never stopped going to NASCAR races after 9-11.

I don't know that NASCAR was like a big target for al-Qaeda, but he's been carrying that weight for years, I guess.

But some posters were starting to ask questions like, why Cedar Creek?

And why only?

Cedar Creek.

It's not the largest or most high-profile reenactment, even in just the immediate area.

I mean, I don't know if you've ever spent time in Virginia, but most of that part of Virginia just is a Civil War battlefield.

Every town has one.

Every town has a plaque.

And Cedar Creek was a Union victory.

Wouldn't these people be happier targeting a reenactment of a Confederate win?

And then, after pages and pages of going back and forth about this decision on the forum,

Gerald himself weighed in.

I volunteer at Cedar Creek.

From what we have been told, and this is not for general release, the Foundation has received threats of bodily harm to the board members, their families, and everyone that helps out.

Then there is the very high cost of security.

It is sad that we live in a world with such a hostile climate to the Confederacy.

MPS has taken battle flags out of all its stores and statues are being taken down.

Here in Virginia, schools, streets, parks, anything named about the Confederacy is being changed.

I do not know if they will officially announce the reason or reasons for this decision.

Last year, they refused to say much and rumors were all over the place.

We all need to maybe send some money to the Foundation for expenses, as this was their only way of raising funds.

With the fall of so many Confederate symbols and events going by the wayside, I now can feel what my ancestors did when the actual Confederacy fell.

So he is victim and perpetrator here, lingering in the comment section watching his fellow Civil War enthusiasts argue about how the community should respond to what he has done.

It's like in every police procedural drama where the killer returns to the scene of the crime just to take in the aftermath.

And again, just as suddenly as the letters began, they stopped again.

He got what he wanted.

The event was canceled.

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In October, just before the now-canceled event would have been approaching, Joe DeRezzo resigned as head of the Foundation's board.

He didn't feel the board was taking the threats seriously enough, although it's unclear what discussions were taking place behind closed doors because there'd been no threats in several months and the event was already canceled.

So I don't know what prompted him to resign just then in October.

And the local paper, the Winchester Star, ran an article about Derezzo's resignation, and like clockwork, a few days after the article ran, the letter started up again.

The foundation got a letter addressed to Derezzo, who again had just resigned, saying, we're sorry to see you go.

and moving on to threatening the foundation's new acting director, Jeanette Schaefer.

And I'm sorry, it gets gross here.

I mean, none of this this was good, but it gets gross again.

I'm always on the fence about repeating things like this, right?

Like, is this just for shock value?

Does this add information to the story?

Do you need to know exactly what he said in order for the story to make sense?

But given his prior conviction for a crime of a sexual nature involving a young girl, I think it does matter.

He wasn't just saying whatever he thought would be the scariest and the nastiest.

Like, this kind of ties back into

his own past.

The letter writer told Derezzo that his, quote, pretty mother and bald-headed dad were safe now that he'd resigned.

But, quote, if Jeanette Schaefer thinks she is safe, well, she is right.

But her children are not.

If she puts together a reenactment to celebrate keeping men in chains, we will come after her girls.

We have a convicted rapist that would love to introduce them to his penis.

There are letters that are a lot more graphic than this when it comes to the sexual threats to those girls.

It's in the court record.

If you're interested in that, I don't see the value in proceeding further.

You get it at this point.

But again,

even though these letters are obviously very frightening, there's something off about them.

The letter writer seems to know way too much about the specific inner workings of the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation.

He knows a lot about the personal lives of these individuals and the way that they interact in this space and the way they run this organization, which again is not large.

This is not a massive, significant operation.

This is a pretty small regional annual event.

One of the letters in this batch threatened to shoot a man named Pat as he opens up the visitor center in the morning.

And members of the board told federal investigators that since those threats in June, the visitor center was only open on a limited basis, and not many people knew about that.

You'd have to be really close to the operation to know that Pat, who is the board's only full-time employee, sometimes opened up the visitor center in the morning alone.

And the letter tried to cast blame on a rat in the organization, claiming that their inside knowledge came from a man named Sean Mowbray.

But Mowbray hadn't been a volunteer with the organization since 2014.

But in 2014, Mowbray was at the center of that dispute that got Gerald kicked out of his reenactment unit.

And it's not just the letters that seem to be escalating in intensity.

The same week he sent that letter threatening to rape those girls, Drake posted on the subreddit for his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, asking for recommendations for a good lawyer.

He owned a lot of antique and reproduction firearms and was an enthusiastic hobbyist in black powder weapons, but he wanted a real gun.

A gun that shoots real bullets.

And when he went to buy one, the store refused to sell him anything after pulling a background check.

Now, his own account of the situation is sort of murky and one-sided, and some of the details I've been able to verify indicate that he's not telling the truth.

But it appears that despite having no felony record, that's true, his conviction for child endangerment comes up on his record as a domestic violence conviction, so they wouldn't sell him a gun because of that.

There's no information in any of the hundreds of pages of court documents I read that gives me any real insight into why he may have wanted to buy a gun that week in particular.

But if I were one of the people who had gotten one of those letters, that timing would take my breath away.

He also traveled to Paris that October, somehow squeezing it into his busy schedule of threatening letters.

He loved the Louvre and Notre Dame, noting in his review that the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame really doesn't do it justice.

And he visited several notable World War II historical sites.

He'd boasted on Reddit earlier that month that he was thinking of getting into World War II reenacting because the Civil War scene was dying out.

McDonald's and Five Guys in Paris both got four stars from Gerald, with one review saying, Seeing McDonald's in Paris was like seeing an old old friend to me.

Cheap and consistent food that is the same flavor around the world.

Fair enough.

But when he got home, it was back to business, firing off a letter to the mayor of Gettysburg on Halloween, again threatening to bomb the annual parade.

The letter demanded that the mayor, quote, cancel the flying of Confederate flags and post it on Facebook.

Then we will leave you alone.

Don't, and someone is going to die.

The ninth and final letter was sent to the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation after the embattled organization announced in December 2018 that they would be holding the reenactment in 2019.

This letter was addressed to Pat, the foundation's only full-time employee, that guy that opens the visitor center sometimes.

The letter asked him, would you like to bury your sister?

Your brother?

We could also just kill you when you sit alone in the visitor center.

We have a guy that likes to rape.

We could send him to visit your sister.

What followed were some sexual threats against the director's daughter that really aren't fit to repeat.

They're, I mean, they're gross.

It's definitely the most specific letter in terms of the actions being threatened and the particular victims being threatened in a way that feels specific enough to be alarming.

What makes a quote-unquote true threat in the eyes of the law is kind of a moving target.

You never really know where the line is where a a federal prosecutor is going to say, I'm taking that one to a grand jury.

But in my experience, reading cases like this, mailing someone a letter that tells them exactly when, where, and how you plan to kill them, that's usually pretty serious.

The law does not like to see that.

But by this time, the feds already know it's Gerald.

By the time Pat is reading this absolutely unhinged letter threatening to rape and kill his sister, the FBI has already gotten Gerald's phone records from Sprint.

They've been conducting physical surveillance, with an FBI agent following him to his storage unit and then returning later with a bomb dog to sniff around the door.

And again,

suddenly, the letters stop.

But this time there's no explanation.

When the letters stopped before, it was because he got something that he wanted.

But this time they just stop.

In a letter to the court before his sentencing, Gerald claims he came to his senses sometime in December 2018 and realized that what he was doing was wrong.

It seems a little bit more likely to me that one of the FBI agents following him around said something to him.

And that's not uncommon.

I've read plenty of threatening communications cases where the agent writing the affidavit describes his first conversation with a guy about threatening to behead a senator or something.

Sometimes they'll come to a guy's door and say, hey, did you post this?

Because you can't do that.

Don't do it again.

And the only reason we're reading the affidavit is because the guy didn't stop posting.

So the next conversation had a very different tone.

And I don't know if that's what happened here.

It doesn't say.

And for as insanely detailed as the documents supporting these search warrants are, there's some really important details missing right here.

If they were following him around in November of 2018 while these letters are still being sent, Why wasn't he arrested until 2022?

It's clear they spent all of 2019 investigating the case.

There are search warrant applications here for his phone, his storage unit, his house, his Google account, and warrants served on his cell phone provider for his cell location data.

The warrants were executed at various times throughout 2019, with the physical search of his home and his storage unit happening in October 2019.

And they have him dead to rights.

The cell site location data puts him at the mailboxes where the letters were mailed on the days that they were mailed.

For some of the letters, he drove out of state to mail them far from his home.

So we have the GPS coordinates showing him leaving his home in Winchester, Virginia, driving to a strip mall in Pennsylvania where there's a USPS Dropbox, and then coming back home.

And we know that on the days that he did that, The letter was picked up at that mailbox and processed at that sorting facility.

So it's, there's not a lot of other explanations for why he's driving to these mailboxes on these days.

And they found the image file for that Antifa logo that was printed on the envelopes on a thumb drive in his house.

We have drone footage from the 2017 reenactment showing his car approaching the area where the bomb was found shortly before it was placed there.

But they gathered all of this evidence.

I mean, more evidence than I've ever seen laid out in documentation like this.

I mean, pages and pages of maps showing his GPS coordinates on the days the letters were mailed.

They gathered all this evidence and they did nothing with it.

The documents associated with all of these search warrants were sealed.

That's normal.

Usually you keep that sealed until the arrest is made.

So nobody knew that his house had been searched except Gerald.

I assume Gerald knew.

I think he had to know.

But after six months, the sealing order expired.

That can happen.

I think in most cases, they're sort of set to auto-expire after a certain amount of time, but you'll see in cases where they haven't made a move yet, the prosecutor will apply to continue sealing.

It's not uncommon.

I think in this case, he must have forgotten to file a motion to continue the sealing.

That's the only explanation I can think of for why they would let these warrants get unsealed when they weren't ready to charge him.

But the sealing order expired.

And somebody noticed immediately, because the very same day, Justin Rorlich wrote an article for courts with the headline, disgruntled civil war reenactor allegedly framed Antifa by fabricating threats against his unit.

I know journalists don't write their own headlines, but somebody's got to do something about that.

That's a mouthful.

And the next day, the Washington Post ran an article with the headline, A civil war reenactment group got threats from Antifa.

It was a disgruntled actor, FBI says.

Again, the headlines.

What are we doing, folks?

But even after these two articles ran in February of 2020, the case sat still.

Well, I guess I can't say that because there was no case.

He hadn't been charged.

He did retain an attorney at this point, and she told the Washington Post that he had no idea why he was being investigated.

Which, like, come on.

Yes, you do.

Yeah, you do.

And it wasn't until September of 2022,

just days before the five-year statute of limitations would run out for that first letter sent in September 2017, that Gerald Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury.

The last bit of his internet activity I can find before his arrest on October 6, 2022 is a post he made the afternoon before.

He spent a few hours replying to posts on a forum for sex doll enthusiasts.

with his final message being praise for a customer service representative named Patrice at a Canadian company called Sex Doll Queen.

Patrice always answers his emails and once sent him a free sex doll head as compensation after UPS damaged the case his doll arrived in.

There's no explanation for the nearly three years between solving the case and arresting the perpetrator.

And maybe it's like those cases I mentioned before where they give a guy a talking to and they say, you know, if I have to come back, it's game over, but you know just knock it off

but i've seen cases like that and usually it's mentioned there will be some sort of incident that brings the agent back to his door but there's no indication here of any new conduct certainly no charged conduct in the years between the search warrant and the arrest warrant right so if they did all this work they search his house you know hypothetically they say to him hey bud knock it off or we have to charge you.

If that had happened, you would assume that there would be some new incident.

But there's not.

Maybe it was a change in office priorities or somebody wanted this one closed specifically.

And there was some turnover in the U.S.

Attorney's Office in Virginia's Western District during that time period, but nothing that really coincides with this timeline.

The assistant U.S.

attorney whose name is on that warrant in 2019 left to become a judge in March of 2021.

The U.S.

Attorney in the Western District left to become a judge in March 2020.

The current U.S.

attorney was sworn in in October 2021.

And that's a lot of in-and-out, but none of that does anything to explain how this case got lost from October 2019 to September of 2022.

I spent way too much time like browsing press releases and looking at LinkedIn pages and trying to sort of track the patterns in the federal indictments coming out of this office to try to make these pieces fit together and They just don't.

They don't.

There's no obvious rationale for this timeline and I don't expect they're going to tell us.

Drake pled guilty in April 2023 in an agreement that dropped most of the charges.

He only had to plead guilty to one count of possessing an unregistered explosive device and one count of stalking.

The stalking count was specifically regarding the letters sent to Joe DeRezzo.

The counts related to the letters sent to everybody else?

were dropped in exchange.

And that's normal.

This is really common.

Data published by the Pew Research Center last year shows nearly 90% of people charged with a federal crime just plead guilty.

They take plea agreements.

8% of cases end up dismissed, leaving only 2.3%

of people charged with a federal crime who actually take their case to trial.

The system desperately needs people to plead guilty, which is a huge motivator for overcharging, right?

You say to a guy, hey, we got you on 20 counts.

You're going away for 110 years.

But hey, maybe we can make a deal for 20 years and then you've saved the United States government the cost of a trial.

It's not a great setup overall, right?

That, you know, our justice system requires that we not actually pursue justice, because if everyone actually pursued justice in the form of the jury trial you're entitled to, the system would collapse.

I mean, it would, it would fall apart instantly.

Just something to think about.

So when you look at this and you see that most of these charges got dropped, it's not because they didn't think they could prove those charges at trial.

They just didn't want to pay for a trial and nine years in prison is enough.

So yes, technically, he is only guilty, legally, of building the bomb and sending the letters to Joe Derezzo threatening to blow up his mom.

The letters threatening to rape Pat's sister and Jeanette's daughters are among those dropped counts.

So in the eyes of the federal government, he is not guilty on those counts.

Not because he was acquitted, he was not found not guilty, but he is not guilty of them in the sense that he was not prosecuted for those.

They were dropped.

Common sense and hundreds of pages of court documents lays out a pretty convincing case that can lead you to your own conclusion.

But the law is what the law is.

He is not guilty of those things.

He's currently serving his nine-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Milan, Michigan.

He asked for a placement in Michigan to be closer to his son.

He'll be 72 when he's released in 2030.

The government has not yet responded to his motion to seal certain case documents related to the dropped counts.

He wrote a letter from prison in December 2023 that certain information in his indictment has caused problems for him when other inmates check his paperwork.

He doesn't get specific, but I assume the threats of graphic sexual violence aren't exactly helping him win friends and influence people, even if those counts were dropped in the plea agreement.

Again, he's not guilty of those things, but it's in the indictment.

So, in the end, it turns out Antifa never threatened to pour cups of piss on Confederate war reenactors or drive a car through the Gettysburg Parade.

It was just Gerald, a weird little guy who was mad he got kicked out of the Civil War club.

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