In the early morning hours of August 22, 2003, in West Covina, California, vandals damaged one building and 125 SUVs across four dealerships and a private neighborhood with paint nd destroyed others with firebombs. The vandals spray-painted messages like “I love POLLUTION” and “SUV = TERRORISM”. Most of all, they repeatedly painted the acronym “ELF,” linking them to the Earth Liberation Front, a leaderless, loosely organized activist group. ELF targeted property and managed to avoid causing serious physical harm to anyone in hundreds of credited attacks from the late 1990s through the 2000s. The government branded ELF a terrorist group, partly because ELF used destructive tactics like arson, which is a common tool of militant groups. And, in fact, multiple SUVs were set on fire that night in 2003.
Either way, the government knew they were looking for passionate environmentalists. Within just a couple of weeks, the feds arrested a suspect, Josh Connole. Connole was a peace activist, vegetarian, and solar panel sales rep. He drove an EV and lived at a commune. All of those things seemed to make him a perfect fit for a particular kind of profile.
But Connole wasn’t the guy. After his arrest was announced, a reporter at the LA Times received the first of multiple emails from “Tony Marsden” that read, “The police have the wrong man here. I was amongst those responsible for the SUV attacks.”
Who sent the email?
Was the sender concerned about an innocent man paying for their crimes? Maybe, but some gloating was involved, too. “We left plenty of clues, none of them pointing to Josh,” the message said, then added smugly, “The FBI hasn’t seemed to pick up on any of them, which makes the whole ordeal very boring for us, the true culprits.” To prove his involvement, he noted that he had spray-painted an equation by Leonhard Euler, an 18th-century Swiss mathematician, on one of the SUVs. That was a detail that hadn’t been released to the public.
His boredom wouldn’t last long, as the emails would be traced to his college, Caltech. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered to send the emails from another location. Law enforcement seized multiple computers from the school and found a cache of the email messages on one of the machines, sent right after the sender checked his own messages. The actual sender of the email, as you might have guessed, was not named “Tony Marsden.” His name was William “Billy” Cottrell, and he was going for his PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech.
If Billy thought that he could successfully deny sending the emails or his involvement in the spree, that wouldn’t last long. Investigators soon matched his DNA to a headband found at the scene of the crime. For Billy, the jig was up.
What happened that night?
At first, Billy told investigators he wouldn’t implicate anyone else in the spree, but later blamed the arson part of it entirely on his friends, Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe. According to Billy, whose statements are a little self-serving and should probably be taken with a grain of salt, Tyler and Michie showed up that night and convinced him to go spray-paint some SUVs with them. Billy wouldn’t have seen this as an odd request, since he and Tyler had recently planned to plaster a couple of hundred SUVs with bumper stickers that said, “My SUV supports terrorism,” though that plan fell through.
The three hit one dealership, then another before moving on to a private neighborhood where they vandalized some more SUVs. It was in that neighborhood where Tyler, according to Billy, set the first SUV on fire. Billy claimed that Tyler had never told him about plans to set anything on fire, and he objected when Tyler used the first firebomb. Supposedly, Tyler said it wouldn’t happen again. But Tyler didn’t stop, and more SUVs were set ablaze at the last dealership hit that night. In fact, a Molotov cocktail accidentally hit Billy’s clothes, setting them on fire. He quickly took off his shirt, which is how his headband wound up on the ground for investigators to find.
A few emails later, police had Billy in handcuffs. Johnson and Oe were later named as unindicted co-conspirators, but had fled the country before they could be arrested.
The Asperger’s syndrome defense
Billy’s defense team had few options. They had to draw a line between spray painting, which wasn’t a federal crime, and arson, which, in this context, it was. But Billy’s attorney came up with an additional defense — Asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome is a diagnostic term, since dropped by the World Health Organization, for a form of Autism that does not include intellectual or language impairment. His attorney hired a medical professional who later diagnosed Billy with the condition.
The defense claimed that his diagnosed condition kept Billy from picking up on social cues that would have told him that Tyler was lying about stopping at just one firebombing. When it came to figuring out other people’s motives, as reported by Los Angeles Magazine, his lawyer asserted that Billy’s brain was like “‘a slow computer’ with a dial-up Internet connection.” That seems like an odd way to describe the brain of a doctoral candidate researching theoretical physics. Still, Billy did fit the common, if ill-informed, stereotypes of adults with Autism spectrum disorder with high intelligence. Why didn’t he bother to drive to another location to send those emails? He had to get back to his theoretical physics work.
It could be considered a questionable defense strategy, given the estimated 5 million U.S. adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder and most of them, we assume, don’t go around vandalizing SUVs. The judge would rule that Asperger’s couldn’t be used as a defense, but that ruling didn’t come until the prosecution had almost rested its case.
The sentence
A jury found Billy guilty of seven counts of arson and conspiracy to commit arson. The judge sentenced him to over eight years, which included three years added because of the supposed terrorism aspect of the crime. He was also ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution.
Billy didn’t do well in prison, even getting into a fight. It seems he tried to change the channel on the TV to the news when the other inmates wanted to watch “I Love Lucy”. His ordeal prompted one of his former professors to write a letter detailing the emotional effects prison conditions were having on Billy. The professor got several prominent physicists, including Stephen Hawking, to sign the letter. It turns out that Billy’s case had prompted an intense interest in the scientific community, with many expressing the view that imprisoning someone of his intelligence was depriving the world of the theoretical advancements he could be making. The letter worked, and Billy would be transferred to a different prison to serve out the rest of his sentence.
Eventually, the arson counts were thrown out, and Billy’s entire sentence was vacated on appeal because his Asperger’s diagnosis wasn’t allowed to be used as a defense. The appellate court kept his conspiracy conviction, though, and sent the case back to the trial judge, who resentenced Billy to eight years for the remaining charge, meaning he would have to serve the same amount of time.
Where are they now?
Billy was finally released in 2011. After he got out, he finished his PhD in 2017 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then held postdoctoral positions at the University of Amsterdam and Stanford University. He would go on to work at Jump Trading and teach a course on cryptocurrencies at the University of Chicago. Overall, things didn’t turn out too bad for him. After all, the government has vowed to seek harsh penalties for this kind of crime, and the current administration has even threatened to send perpetrators of similar crimes to El Salvador.
What about his friends? Tyler Johnson fled to Europe and eventually wound up on the island of Corsica. He got by working odd jobs and even founded a nonprofit that supplied solar-powered ovens to households in impoverished communities. He also liked to hike the mountains, which would lead to his tragic death in 2010 in an avalanche. A documentary entitled “Finding Tyler” would be filmed about him after his death.
As far as we can tell, Michie Oe has never been caught. Her name doesn’t appear in any law enforcement arrest databases we can search. Whether Billy actually participated in the arson that night or was only a willing participant in the spray painting is anyone’s guess. But so far, he’s the only one who has paid the price for what happened.
