The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Return of the Pro Se Pipsqueak: Disney and Hulu Get Sued by Brett Kimberlin!

Posted on | July 25, 2025 | Comments Off on Return of the Pro Se Pipsqueak: Disney and Hulu Get Sued by Brett Kimberlin!

In 1978, four teenagers who worked at a Burger Chef fast-food restaurant in the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway, Indiana, were kidnapped and murdered. The local police badly bungled the investigation, and no one was ever convicted for what was at the time a very notorious local crime. The popularity of “true crime” podcasts has renewed attention to this case, and last year a documentary film, The Speedway Murders, was released. It’s now streaming on Hulu and — because it mentions a certain convicted bomber — it has become the target of a lawsuit.

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In reporting that Brett Kimberlin’s lawsuit has been removed to federal court from its original Maryland venue, Eugene Volokh says, “The allegations are complex, and I don’t have the time to summarize them. I’m flagging the case chiefly because some of our longtime readers might be interested in Brett Kimberlin from his various appearances on the blog, chiefly stemming from brushes with early bloggers.”

Yes, we all remember that. One of the things you must remember is that I’ve been a journalist since 1986, and spent decades with a copy of the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual on my desk. The secret to avoiding libel is simple: (a) stick to the facts and (b) always attribute accusations. It is not me, the reporter, who is accusing the suspect of a crime; rather, I am merely reporting what “police say” the suspect has done.

“Sue Me Again, You Evil Liar” was the headline on my post reporting how Brett Kimberlin’s defamation lawsuit against me, Aaron Walker, John Hoge and Ali Akbar was laughed out of court by a Maryland judge in 2014. Among the sources I cited in my blogging about Kimberlin was Mark Singer’s definitive book Citizen K, as well as contemporary reporting by Joe Gelarden in the Indianapolis Star.

Brett Kimberlin’s convictions as the Speedway Bomber are a matter of public record. The pro se pipsqueak recently tried to have his convictions overturned, but lost at every step of the way, getting brutally curb-stomped by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared flatly, “Kimberlin’s arguments . . . are meritless.” Undeterred, Kimberlin appealed to the Supreme Court and, when they denied certiorari for the case Kimberlin v. United States in January 2023, I wrote:

Because you can’t argue pro se before the Supreme Court, the pipsqueak perjurer enlisted the legal assistance of well-connected Democrat lawyer Neal Katyal’s firm, but Kimberlin’s case was so preposterously weak that not even a big-dollar law firm could salvage it. So, if you’re keeping score at home, the final tally:

United States ………… 1
Brett Kimberlin …….. 0

Despite all that, however, I cannot presume to know whether the producers of The Speedway Murders might have somehow defamed Kimberlin. As I’ve explained, my reliance on such sources as Singer’s book and Gelarden’s reporting protected me against any finding of libel — it was not me making these accusations, see? I never claimed to have any more knowledge about what happened in Indiana circa 1978 than had previously been reported by others, or established as matters of fact in legal proceedings. Possibly, the makers of this documentary movie about the Burger Chef murders were not as careful about such things, and defeating Kimberlin’s litigation might not be such a slam-dunk for them as it was for me and my co-defendants. However . . .

If Kimberlin is contesting whether he was suspected of involvement in the murder of Julia Scyphers — making the filmmaker’s reference to that suspicion the basis of his defamation claim — he is likely to fail once again. Although the Scyphers murder has never been officially solved, certain facts about the case have been previously reported:

While no motive [for the 1978 bombings] was established at trial, prosecutors and police believe Kimberlin went on the bombing spree to deflect attention away from an ongoing investigation of the murder of 65-year-old Julia Scyphers. Scyphers “violently disapproved” of her daughter Sandra Barton’s relationship with Kimberlin as well as the “strange affection” Kimberlin paid to Barton’s pre-teen daughter, who had accompanied Kimberlin on several long unsupervised out-of-state trips. On July 29, 1978, Scyphers was shot to death just outside her home. Her husband Fred Scyphers, who briefly saw the shooter, identified William Bowman as the gunman. Bowman was a close associate of Kimberlin in the drug trade but Fred, the prosecution’s only witness, died shortly after the murder and Bowman was never charged. Scyphers’ murder still remains unsolved.

So said Wikipedia last time I checked.

Joe Gelarden referred to Barton’s daughter (Julia Scypher’s granddaughter) as “Debbie,” but when it came time for Singer to publish his 1996 book about Kimberlin, he used the pseudonym “Jessica.”

“For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
“Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.’ To another, Sandi explained that although Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended ‘to wait for her and would marry her.’”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

“Debbie”/“Jessica” was only 10 years old in 1974, and thus would have been 14 when her grandmother was murdered in 1978.

Obviously, suspicion is not synonymous with proof, but one does not commit libel merely by expressing suspicion, especially when that same suspicion was shared by law enforcement officials. Which is to say, if you add 1 + 1 and decide the answer is 2, your arithmetic is not a tort.

Just for the record, by the way, I am informed by people who have looked into the Burger Chef murders that Kimberlin almost certainly was not involved with that particular crime which was likely committed by someone personally connected to one of those teenage victims.

We shall see what becomes of Kimberlin’s latest lawsuit, but I wish the attorneys for the defendants in the Kimberlin v. Hulu case would get in touch with me. I could offer them some excellent advice — for a price.



 

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Category: Crime, The Kimberlin Files

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