The 1972 Bombing of a Small-Town Cop
Dennis Eugene Cordes, the name that kept resurfacing. A Springdale native, a career criminal, and a meth cook before anyone in town knew what meth was. He was the kind of man who liked to test limits and lost every time. His name shows up in drug trials, assault charges, and enough police reports to wallpaper a cell.
Springdale, Arkansas, 1972. The air smelled like asphalt, chicken feed, and sin. You could tell what shift the processing plants were on by the direction of the wind. Honeysuckle tried to fight it in spring, but it never won. This was a town teetering between progress and combustion.
Then, one February night, the air got a little bomby.
Lieutenant Karl Martens of the Springdale Police Department wasn’t just a cop. He was the kind of man who knew every engine by sound. He’d kept order through chicken strikes, factory fights, and all the usual chaos that only made headlines when blood spilled. On February 24, 1972, someone decided he shouldn’t see another sunrise.
The blast shattered the quiet, scattering shrapnel and suspicion across Northwest Arkansas. In a place like Springdale, rumors didn’t walk. They raced. Some blamed the Tyson strike, others said it was personal. A few swore it was something darker, that someone had brought dynamite to town and didn’t plan to leave alive.
The Investigation That Went Nowhere Fast
The Springdale Police Department and ATF tried to build a clean case. What they made was a maze. The FOIA files show chaos in motion. Too many agencies, too many egos, too many notes written by men who didn’t trust each other.
They pulled in Phillip Francis Esslinger, a 28-year-old farmer out of Missouri. He was caught in Rogers driving a 1959 Chevy with two sticks of Dupont gelatin dynamite and caps in the glove box. The man had the wrong answers to every question. The reports paint him as someone who knew enough about explosives to make people nervous, and too little about his own story to be believed.
Then came Dennis Eugene Cordes, the name that kept resurfacing. A Springdale native, a career criminal, and a meth cook before anyone in town knew what meth was. He was the kind of man who liked to test limits and lost every time. His name shows up in drug trials, assault charges, and enough police reports to wallpaper a cell.
Cordes had history with Martens and the department. He had motive, he had rage, and he had access to men who liked to play with dynamite.
Huntsville, Arkansas · Thursday, July 18, 1996
The Mother Who Wouldn’t Let Go
Years later, Cordes wound up behind bars again, this time on federal drug charges. Most men in his position would have stayed there. But his mother, Helen Wilkins, wasn’t most people.
Fort Smith, Arkansas · Saturday, August 10, 1996
In 1996, she and private investigator Connie Lewis helped him escape the Washington County Jail. They used smuggled tools, cut bolts, and drove him out through the night. When she was caught, Helen told the press her son had been framed since the bombing.
It was hard to argue with her resolve. Helen wasn’t just defending a son. She was fighting the same system that had failed to solve Martens’ attempted murder.
A Town That Wanted to Forget
Springdale today has paved over its scars, but the bones are still there. The Trade Winds Motel, the Holiday Inn, the feed mills, the neon signs humming through dust. Every piece of ground from that investigation is still standing.
The FOIA files — hundreds of pages of interviews, redactions, and receipts — show a clear start and a slow fade. Evidence gathered, witnesses questioned, leads gone stale. The ATF documented every stick of dynamite, every statement, every dead end. Then the case just stopped breathing.
This was a small town that preferred a clean story to a messy truth.
The Hard Truth
When I spoke with a Springdale Police contact, who practically ran the Springdale Police Department through the late eighties and nineties, he didn’t dodge the question.
“They wanted it buried,” he told me. “And they buried it deep.”
He believed Cordes was involved. Maybe not the man who lit the fuse, but close enough to smell the smoke. Harding had seen the files, talked to the men who worked the case, and knew exactly how far some people would go to protect their own.
Half a century later, the case still doesn’t make sense. The facts don’t align. The players are dead. The silence remains.
The Story That Wouldn’t Die
The 1972 bombing of Lt. Karl Martens wasn’t just a crime. It was the moment Springdale lost its sense of safety. After that night, people locked their doors. Cops stopped feeling untouchable.
Cordes went on to spend decades behind bars. He escaped once, got caught again, and died somewhere between regret and delusion. The man who thought he could outsmart everyone never outsmarted time.
Maybe he did it. Maybe he just knew who did. Maybe the truth was boxed up and filed under “unsolved” because it was easier that way.
Either way, the sound of that explosion still echoes through this town. And until the whole story is told, it always will.