Nashville bomber’s pal speaks out
Man consumed by conspiracy theories took his own life
Crystal Deck recalls Anthony Warner’s quirks, clues, obsessions and conspiracy theories.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Crystal Deck was opening presents on Christmas morning at her brother’s home when she heard the news that an enormous explosion had ripped through the historic heart of Nashville.
She knew instantly that the bomber was her dearest friend, Anthony Warner, and quickly began fitting together clues that he had dropped, including a series of peculiar episodes she had dismissed as inconsequential, but which proved to be central to his suicidal plot.
Deck had, weeks earlier, found him fiddling with a prerecorded female voice on his laptop. And he had played her the 1964 Petula Clark hit “Downtown,” praising the song’s “significant spirit.” Both became eerie elements of the bombing.
Warner had even cautioned her that he was hatching something that would bring the police to her door, yet until that moment she had not understood the magnitude of his plan.
Though Warner’s motive remains shrouded, false information and outlandish tales had poisoned his mind, apparently driving him to spectacular violence. This mindset has become alarmingly familiar to law enforcement officials now reckoning with the destructive force of conspiracy theories that mutate endlessly online and played a role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Warner, who was 63 when he died, was not among the angry QAnon followers who came to believe the unlikely theory that former President Donald Trump would hold onto power and defeat a satanic cabal. He was a computer specialist with a deep distrust of government, according to his own writings and to those who knew him. A loner, he had made at least one female friend feel manipulated and frightened. And he had cultivated a bizarre obsession with shape-shifting alien lizards and a dense thicket of other peculiar ideas.
As Warner’s best friend in his final months, Deck believes that some combination of a fatal cancer diagnosis salted with a belief in conspiracy theories led Warner to kill himself in such a brutally spectacular manner.
“He was trying to escape,” said Deck, who is not considered a suspect. “He talked about going out on his own terms.”
Warner, authorities said, drove his booby-trapped white recreational vehicle to Second Avenue North in the predawn hours. The detonation damaged some 50 buildings, collapsing a few and shearing the antique brick facades off others that will require years and tens of millions of dollars to restore. Two months later, the blast area remains a confused, desolate patchwork of boarded-up buildings, chain-link fencing and uneven reconstruction efforts.
The explosion, in front of an AT&T hub, crippled cellular, internet and cable service across several states for two days and underscored the vulnerability of such common yet unprotected facilities.
The FBI and other federal and local law enforcement agencies investigating the bombing have not made any findings public, although officials said they expect a report by early March.
Whatever else might have been on Warner’s mind in the period leading up to his death, he had been fixated for years on the notion that alien reptiles who inhabited underground tunnels controlled the Earth, a fantasy spread by a notorious British serial conspiracy theorist. The giant lizards, Warner said, appeared among us as humans.
By the summer of 2019, he was making a friend, Pamela Perry, increasingly anxious, according to Raymond Throckmorton III, a Nashville lawyer who had represented both Perry and Warner on various matters.
“Pam Perry had had numerous contacts with me where she was just emotionally distraught and had been just really whipped into a frenzy of emotion by apparently crazy things or threatening or unusual things that Tony had said to her,” Throckmorton said. “I think he just sensed that she was at a weak point in her life and it was somebody he could dominate, manipulate or control.”
In August 2019, Perry told police that she believed Warner was building bombs in the RV parked outside his house on Bakertown Lane, and Throckmorton told the police that Warner was capable of building explosives. Officers went to his home but neither the Nashville police nor the FBI pursued an investigation. A police and municipal review committee is now scrutinizing why.
Perry, through lawyers, declined to comment.
Deck, 44, first met Warner several months later, when he came into the South Nashville Waffle House where she worked. “The first time I met him, I just thought his cornbread wasn’t really done in the middle and he was off a little bit,” she said.
Now, in retrospect, Deck dredges her memory for clues of what was to come.
By the time she met him, Warner was clearly preparing for a transition. He had largely emptied his house, save for an air mattress and a computer in the living room.
He hinted that he had been told he had cancer, but she did not pry.
In early December, he sent a letter to his IT clients, telling them that he was retiring. He deeded his house to the daughter of a former girlfriend. Deck saw him last on Dec. 17, when he showed up at the Waffle House to give her his car, a white 2007 Pontiac Vibe, along with the jacket and gloves he used to wear when he walked her dog.
He implied that he had little time left.
On Christmas morning in downtown Nashville, several residents who were awakened around 4:30 a.m. by what sounded like loud, rapid bursts of gunfire phoned the police. The officers who responded found no indication of shots fired, and Deck said that Warner used gunfire noises as a ring tone on his cellphone.
He apparently used the sound that morning to attract attention, because a computerized, female voice — the voice Deck had heard him manipulating weeks earlier — soon began emanating from the vehicle, saying, “Stay clear of this vehicle, evacuate now. Do not approach this vehicle!” The police evacuated as many residents as they could.
The voice, more insistent, announced that the vehicle would detonate. It began a 15-minute countdown, interspersed with continued warnings to evacuate as well as snippets from the song “Downtown.”
“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown.”
At 6:30 a.m., surveillance video showed, a giant fireball erupted around the RV and the resulting concussion rocked the neighborhood.
Warner was the only person killed.