On a walk through the desert this summer, he told me that he’s originally from Ohio, was sexually abused as a kid, and later fell into selling drugs. The personal story he tells is one of victimhood and redemption. His full name is Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, but “Michael Meyer,” he says, is an entirely different man. Bundyites kicked him out of both events.Īrthur, 39, is 6 foot 2, with red hair, freckles and hazel eyes. Two years later, he showed up at the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge led by Cliven’s sons.īut even in those far-right circles, Arthur is considered a fringe character, known as “Screwy Louie.” At Bundy Ranch, he reportedly called police to the protest site, and in Oregon, he tried to “help” an acquaintance, militiaman Ryan Payne, and “women and children” by rescuing them from the refuge, the occupation of which Arthur believed was misguided. Arthur had traveled to Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014 to help prevent the Bureau of Land Management from removing the cows Cliven Bundy had illegally grazed for decades. I FIRST HEARD of Lewis Arthur in early June, when JJ MacNab, an expert on anti-government movements, tweeted about his “one-sided standoff.” It caught my eye because Arthur had connections to the Bundy family, the Nevada ranchers at the center of two recent armed confrontations with federal land managers. But the medical examiner analyzed them, too, and concluded they were animal remains. Some of Arthur’s followers found more bones and suggested they came from people who had died terrible deaths. One person told me it was so fresh when it was found, they saw it “dripping.” The camp became evidence of a massive pedophile ring implicating Cemex, the Mexican cement company that owns the property. Their stories became more elaborate: The skull became a partial corpse. But in 2018 - at a time when social media, a conspiracy-minded president, and the erosion of trust in public institutions are providing fertile ground for wild-eyed theories - the story kept gaining life.įrom as far away as Australia, believers travelled to the Tucson desert to deliver vigilante justice to the sex traffickers. In a pre-internet world, the whole thing might have ended there, without any more newspaper ink or the involvement of the FBI. The Arizona Daily Star and other local news outlets published stories debunking the claims. Officers sent the skull to the Pima County medical examiner, who concluded that it had belonged to an adult and been found miles away from the homeless camp. Arthur then claimed he and two friends had found proof: a child’s skull. Tucson police and sheriff’s deputies both investigated the site and found nothing more than a former homeless camp - no evidence of sex trafficking. There was just one problem with Arthur’s story: It wasn’t true. When he posted videos arguing that there were probably bodies buried at the camp and that it was part of a network of Arizona sex trafficking sites, he topped 680,000 views in days. He posted an outraged rant on Facebook and started getting comments - a lot of them. The reporter pointed out children’s clothes, an old toilet seat and a septic tank where Arthur claimed kids had been held against their will.Īrthur had stumbled across the camp while canvassing the area for homeless vets. KOLD News 13 reporter Kevin Adger told viewers that a local veterans’ rights activist named Lewis Arthur had made a horrific discovery in the bushes beside a frontage road: a bunker used as a stopover by child sex traffickers. On May 31, a strange story aired on the nightly news in Tucson, Arizona.
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