- He pulls out a Ruger 9 millimeter,
and Dykes shoots it five times in front of 21 kids.
- This guy's already committed a homicide.
I have no reason to think that he wouldn't do it again.
- Behind the bus driver is this little kid, Ethan.
Just throws him over his shoulder,
runs toward a bunker that he built on his property.
- If they could get a clear shot on Dykes,
they would take it, but it had to be a game-ending shot,
basically a kill shot.
He said, by tomorrow, 5:30, if I don't get what I want,
the motherfuckers up there who are in charge,
they're gonna be responsible for what happens.
- All right, and so he's got a hostage,
but does he really want-- does he wanna kill cops?
Is that what he wants?
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[dramatic music]
♪
- Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included organized crime
and terrorism and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
Coppola finished her career with the Los Angeles Division
running two offices, supervising investigations
and providing undercover security for special events.
- But the thing is, I don't know,
how did you guys even meet?
- We met on this crazy
hostage bunker case... - Bunker.
- Which was nine years ago,
coming up on ten years. - Coming up on ten years.
- It will be ten years in January, February.
I was in bed asleep, and my BlackBerry started going off.
And all we were told was that there was a little boy
who'd been kidnapped, and a bus driver had been killed.
- Molly Amman was a profiler
at the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico.
She specialized in domestic threats,
stalkers, extortionists, mass attackers,
and active shooters.
- And there was a note, and they wanted to know
what the profilers could make of that note.
♪
We spent a couple hours on it. Went back to bed at 1:00,
thinking that it would be over.
Usually, these things are over
by the time you wake up the next morning,
but that was not the case at all.
- Just before 4:00 p.m. yesterday,
we responded to a shooting on a Dale County school bus
and discovered that the suspect had fled the scene
with a small child.
- And Bill, you were still at HRT, right?
- Yeah.
So HRT is the Hostage Rescue Team.
It's the FBI's counterterrorism team.
- Bill Francis was with the FBI's
Elite Hostage Rescue Team for 17 years,
most of it as a team leader.
He specialized in hostage situations,
high security events, and dignitary protection.
- So what actually, though, happened?
Like, you know, what was the beginning of it?
- It was a little city called Midland City,
just outside of Dothan, Alabama.
A man called Jimmy Lee Dykes befriended bus driver,
Charles Poland, by improving a turnaround
on his property for a school bus.
The school bus would come up the drive every morning,
pick up the kids.
And reverse in the afternoon,
come up, drop the kids off.
So the bus had to make a turn on his property.
And Dykes would often get on the bus at the turnaround
and give the bus driver vegetables
that he grew on his property.
And the bus driver felt sorry for Dykes.
He would give stuff that his wife had made,
like jellies, eggs, things like that.
- So there was a video from the bus.
The bus had a rearward facing camera
that was set over the driver's head.
So you couldn't see the driver,
but you could see everything after, like,
the first row of seats in the bus.
♪
- So on this particular day, on the 29th,
it's the afternoon, 3:00-ish,
and Dykes has a bag with collard greens
or something sticking out the top.
As soon as Dykes gets on the bus,
the bus driver thinks he's gonna give him vegetables.
He drops the bag.
He pulls out a Ruger 9 millimeter.
♪
And he points it at the bus driver.
Hands him a note at this point,
and then he demands two children,
well-behaved, six to ten years of age.
He claims that they're not gonna be harmed.
Bus driver, of course, refuses to give him the children.
He says, "The kids are my responsibility.
I can't do that."
Very clearly denies Dykes' request.
- Dykes becomes more animated as time goes on.
What Dykes doesn't know is there's another child
on the bus about halfway back, Tre Watts,
who is on the phone with 911.
- I cannot risk the kids.
- At some point, Dykes hears the sirens, and he says that.
He says, "The law is coming. I don't have much time."
- "Give me--I need two kids."
Bus driver says, "I can't do that.
I can't. I can't."
- Dykes says he's gonna have to shoot him.
- Dykes ultimately shoots him, and he shoots him five times
in front of 21 kids on a bus.
- That's horrible. - Cold-blooded murder
in front of those kids.
- Immediately behind the bus driver is this little kid,
Ethan, just scared, crouched down behind there.
And he's trying to grab the closest kid to him.
You can hear Dykes saying...
- "Come here. Come here, kid. Come here."
[children screaming and crying]
Ethan had Asperger's syndrome,
and that was the reason he was in that front seat,
because the driver wanted to keep an eye on him
because he had some issue-- behavioral issues.
So Dykes was able to grab Ethan.
He's five years old, you know, very light kid.
Just throws him over his shoulder and takes off,
runs toward a bunker that he built on his property.
He lived in a FEMA trailer.
The bunker's over here
where the little square hatch is.
And that's when he calls 911.
- The hardest part of that to watch was at the end
when the kids-- he's off the bus, Ethan's gone.
You can see the kids tracking out the window,
then facing forward on Mr. Poland
and losing their minds,
understanding what had just happened.
- But you hadn't gotten called yet?
- Right, but we were aware of the kidnapping on the 29th.
- In the 911 call, Dykes directs law enforcement.
He says he has a-- he has a kid.
He's a hostage.
He wants law enforcement to come to his gate
on his road and speak to him through this PVC pipe.
- I remember seeing that on the news.
It was, like, this white thing
coming up out of the ground, right?
- Yeah. We called it the speaking tube.
- What did he say that he wanted?
- It was pretty weird from a violent crime standpoint.
What he wanted was a reporter
who he identified by name--
so it was someone that he liked, female reporter.
He wanted her to come down into the bunker,
and then he would let Ethan go.
And he said that she would hold his hand while he told his--
she broadcast his story to the world,
and then he would die by suicide, which is...
- Crazy. - Nuts.
- And of course, the Bureau would never allow that.
- That was a hard no.
But so well thought-out.
That was the scary part.
- This bunker had one entry point,
and we had to get in there quick enough
to save Ethan before Dykes had time to shoot the hostage.
Sometime, I think it was around 9:00 that night,
he's done talking for the day, he goes to bed.
The bomb techs show up.
They decide they want to get visual into the bunker.
They decide they're gonna drill a hole through that pipe
and then send about 200 feet of fiber optic cable
and maybe get a look inside.
Well, when they penetrated that 3-inch pipe,
the drill bit hit something else solid.
- Oy.
- These are bomb techs. - Yeah.
- Their spidey senses went crazy at that point.
So they brought in, of course, an X-ray machine,
X-rayed the pipe, and lo and behold,
inside the pipe was about a 3-foot section of pipe bomb.
- Oh, my God, so they're, like, up close,
you know, talking through this tube,
and then now they're drilling a hole
potentially where a bomb could go off.
So in their minds now,
they gotta think Dykes is pretty smart, right?
- Sure. Sure.
He's very smart.
He's not all there, but he's very smart
in terms of his actions and his planning.
- The pipe bomb in the speaking tube
raised all kinds of questions.
All right, so he's got a hostage,
but does he really want-- does he wanna kill cops?
Is that what he wants?
Did he really have a story to tell?
I mean, the questions at that point
were many more than we had answers.
- Police in Midland City, Alabama,
say a man shot and killed a school bus driver
and then grabbed a 6-year-old boy from the bus
and took him to an underground bunker.
Now, hostage negotiators are trying to end the standoff
that began more than 24 hours ago.
- By the next morning, FBI came down on the scene.
This was 100% a joint effort,
state, federal, local,
probably 300 sworn law enforcement officers.
We didn't want Dykes to know that we knew
there was an IED in the speaking tube.
And we brought up a speaker on a pole,
put it right into the tube
so Dykes would continue to think
someone was talking to him at the speaker.
- That's cool. That's a good idea.
- At that point, what they wanted to do
was get a negotiator throw phone into there,
because they could actually call him when they wanted to.
- Knowing the Bureau,
we could probably record it as well, right?
- Sure, sure. Record it... - You know, so--yeah.
- Analyze it for intel, that kind of stuff.
Let us give you this phone. - Okay.
- You can call us whenever you want to.
We'll always have somebody ready to talk to you.
So he agreed. - That was so critical,
not just to communicate with him,
but it established his willingness to open the hatch.
And that was a tremendous victory for the negotiators,
getting that willingness established,
because now, we can start to habituate him
to opening it again on request.
- What does the bunker look like?
- What Dykes had done is he put--the hatch was heavy.
It was heavy. It was built with 2x6s.
So it was stout.
Had a big lip all the way around,
which prevented us from really seeing
down in there very much.
Very large Alabama country boys only lift that hatch
as far as he would let them lift it.
Believe me, he didn't need anything from us.
He had water for weeks.
He had food for weeks.
He had a bucket in there for a toilet.
He had ventilation.
He needed nothing from us.
- He had estimated that he had enough supplies
for six to eight weeks.
- What we did have is we had Ethan.
- Police have shared few details
about negotiations with Jimmy Lee Dykes.
They are speaking to him through a 4-inch
ventilation pipe connected to his underground shelter.
His five-year-old hostage has been identified only as Ethan.
- Ethan had been diagnosed with what was then known
as Asperger syndrome and another condition,
and that's what required
a couple of different medications.
- So the local FBI there was able to contact,
obviously, the mother or father,
or they were able to talk to him and say,
this is what he needs.
- Yes, the mother supplied that information
and the medicine for that.
- But Dykes didn't know this when he took him.
- But as Ethan would start to act up,
it was more work for Dykes.
So negotiators were able to sort of
weave that into the conversation.
Say, hey, if you let us deliver this medicine
twice a day, sometimes it was three times a day,
this will keep him calm.
And he was all about that.
He was all about keeping Ethan calm,
because this bunker is-- it's tight.
So that allowed us to have him open that hatch,
to crack it for-- you know, several times a day,
and we could collect intel
every time it happened. - That's awesome.
- The FBI had this huge operation set up
at this church, Destiny Church,
which is immediately down the road from Dykes' property.
First thing we had to do was shrink that problem down.
There is potential for IEDs all over this property.
We looked at the property,
and there's these pipes sticking up, PVC pipes.
- Do you think they're vents for air or no?
- We don't know. - Right.
- Knowing that he's talked about having IEDs
and booby traps, so we have to clear
that whole area of those IEDs, and we did.
We brought in our canines with explosive detection.
We ultimately didn't find anything
between the speaking tube IED and the hatch of the bunker.
While we were doing that, we collected up
pretty much every piece of garbage we could find.
- And did you guys find anything useful
in the trash cover? - Oh, my goodness, we did.
We did. We found a triggering device.
Like, it was a shotgun taped into a plastic bottle.
We found hundreds of shotgun shells
that had been cut open, the powder removed.
- Okay. - We found PVC pipes,
we found glue, we found receipts for bicycle cables,
propane tanks, eye bolts, all these different things.
And those were all-- all proved to be, like,
a treasure trove of intel
in terms of how this hatch was constructed.
The other thing we did is, every time we went up,
one of our Houston County partners,
who was actually the voice at the bunker
for the whole seven days, the original guy,
we were able to route a camera through his glove,
a little pinhole camera.
So every time he would go to lift that hatch,
he could shoot video under the hatch.
[dramatic music]
♪
- A 5-year-old boy is being held at gunpoint
for a third day in a hostage standoff
in Midland City, Alabama.
A 65-year-old man with a history
of violent run-ins with his neighbors
kidnapped the boy from a school bus.
Those neighbors identify him as Jimmy Lee Dykes,
and police say that he shot and killed the bus driver
who tried to shield his students.
- What do you guys do then?
- So what we're driving toward
is a deliberate assault,
which is a planned assault.
So we decide when to go.
- Yeah, it's fatal funnel.
Like, you have a fatal funnel going.
- We wanted our own area to practice our assault,
to refine this deliberate assault option.
The only area they had was a building across the street,
which they described to us as, that's the old strip club.
And within hours, we had a full-scale mock-up built
right behind the strip club. - Wow.
♪
- Meantime, while we're doing this,
Molly is developing this profile of our subject.
- When I watched the bus video a few times,
quickly realized that I was coming up with a profile,
or at least the beginnings of a profile
that was really very alarming.
- What I saw was,
I saw Jimmy Lee Dykes wasn't getting what he wanted,
and time was ticking.
You could hear it in his voice.
- Nothing was going according to plan really,
but he stayed on mission.
He was completely focused.
And so I showed that to Bill and I pointed that out to him,
and this guy's already committed a homicide.
I have no reason to think that he wouldn't do it again.
I think that in a confrontation,
he would very likely use lethal force against your guys.
- What did he say that he wanted?
- He wanted to tell his story.
He thought, this reporter will come down into the hole,
and she will broadcast my story as I tell it live,
and the world will essentially be inflamed
and revolution will erupt.
Something having to do with systematic injustices
perpetrated against the little guy
by those with celebrity, power, money, et cetera.
- Yeah, he hated the government or the establishment or...
- He--it's more accurate to say that he hated
any aspect of the establishment or the government
that affected him in a way he didn't like.
- That hostage standoff in Midland City, Alabama,
is going into its fourth day.
The police have been speaking with Dykes
through a ventilation pipe.
No progress so far.
- We did see a change in behavior
because he sort of treated Ethan,
not with kindness, but almost grandfatherly.
He fed him. He made sure he brushed his teeth.
You know, he helped him go to the bathroom,
those kinds of things.
And when Ethan would cry,
he would try to comfort him.
We're always looking along the way
for targets of opportunity that might pop up.
The deputy, he would go up to the hatch every day
and have conversations with Dykes.
And he would complain that the hatch was so heavy,
it was hurting his back.
But he would have to grab the hatch
and do a squat to lift it up to 3 or 4 inches.
It was that heavy.
So they had this conversation a couple of times,
and Dykes explained that he had a frame,
and he says that he can help him attach springs,
and it'll make it easier on the deputy...
- Sure. - To lift that hatch.
We saw that as a target of opportunity.
♪
The plan was pretty simple,
that the negotiators would talk to Dykes.
They would accept his offer
to assist in reattaching the springs.
His assistance would involve him coming up
into the access tube,
lifting up from underneath on the hatch.
- So he'd have to be somewhat close
to the top of the ladder or steps or whatever.
- Well, that's what we were thinking.
So we got permission to execute this plan.
We had assaulters staged right at the edge of the hatch,
right at the lip.
Their objective was, if they could get
a clear shot on Dykes, they would take it,
and they would end the problem right there.
But it had to be a game-ending shot,
basically a kill shot.
So we were really inches from getting a clean shot on Dykes
and ending the situation on day five.
But in those fractions of seconds,
he viewed a barrel, a gun barrel,
before our guys could actually get a shot on him.
- Ah, shit. - And he went back down
in a hurry, around the corner,
slammed the hatch, dogged it down.
And this just kind of spiraled him out of control.
Went back to negotiators, "What are you guys doing?
You're trying to kill me. That hero up there."
And he just went off. He just went off.
- This is a game-changer, a turnaround point, right?
- It really was. Shortly after that
is when he gave the first deadline,
where he said, by tomorrow, 5:30,
if I don't get what I want,
the motherfuckers up there who are in charge,
they're gonna be responsible for what happens,
basically implying that he's gonna probably detonate
that IED if he doesn't get what he wants by 5:30 the next day.
- These are some of the behaviors that we call
warning behaviors, that warn that someone
is really on a trajectory towards violence.
- He was a time bomb waiting to go off.
If he really wanted to,
he could turn around and kill Ethan.
- Nothing could dislodge him from his insistence
that he and Ethan were going to die.
- Dykes starts shooting at us,
and it was just a man trap.
We hear this loud explosion behind us.
- I said, Director Mueller, no assumption can be made
that Ethan is safe in his custody even one more minute.
- At that point, we were pretty fucked.