A troubled QAnon follower who believes that former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are trying to have her killed booby-trapped her house with shotguns and pepper spray. She claimed her ex-husband was secretly filming child pornography on the Clintons’ behalf, and is now facing felony charges after being arrested last week.
The incident is the latest example of how QAnon, a conspiracy movement that its adherents repeatedly claim to be peaceful, can drive believers to commit violent, and often deadly, acts.
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But the incident earlier this month could have been much worse. In a comment on her Facebook page on Tuesday night, the QAnon believer claimed that when police arrived at her home: “I had 20 guns on me.”
On March 9, a door-to-door salesman named Dylan Martin approached the front door of a house occupied by Bryan Hill and Tracy Jo Remington in Colorado.
Martin, who works for a house painting company, didn’t notice the “no trespassing” sign just to the left of the steps leading up to the front porch, and walked straight into a tripwire the residents had set up.
Martin heard “a loud bang [and] saw a bright white flash of light,” according to an affidavit reviewed by VICE News. He “immediately felt disoriented with his vision being blurred and [causing] his ears to ring.”
A few houses away, Martin’s colleague Christoper Howard heard the bang and was certain it was a gunshot. Howard rushed to the house and checked Martin over. At that point, the garage door opened, and Hill shouted at the pair: “No trespassing.”
After the incident, Howard and Martin quickly left the area. But over the next few days, Martin’s hearing was still affected and he had a constant headache. He called the police to report the incident, and on March 14, officers visited the property and found the tripwire. They also found a shotgun-type device connected to the tripwire that used blanks to recreate the noise of a 12-gauge shotgun but without the projectiles, in a bush to the side of the path.
The officers, after speaking to people in the area, discovered that the residents of the house had told their neighbors not to let their kids play near the house, according to the charging documents.
On March 15, a SWAT team executed a search warrant at the house and found a second device at the rear of the house that was also linked to a tripwire and contained pepper spray. Officers noted in the affidavit that public workers have the right to enter people’s backyards to complete their work and that the device was putting them in danger.
When detectives at the scene asked him about the trip wires, Hill called the booby traps “warning devices,” and said Remington was aware they were there.
Hill and Remington were both charged with six counts, including assault and conspiracy. The pair were released on bail and are scheduled to appear in court next month, according to court records.
When asked, police said they could not comment on why Remington and Hill had placed the devices on their property, citing an on-going investigation—but VICE News has found that Remington believed they were necessary to protect her against the enemies of the QAnon movement.
Remington remains active in the QAnon community and continues to make wild allegations about the Clintons, though her social media following is just a fraction of what it once was. However, dozens of her supporters have contributed to a crowdfunding campaign set up on her behalf, raising over $3,600 of its $60,000 target in just over 24 hours.
Remington’s belief in conspiracy theories began well before the QAnon conspiracy first emerged in late 2017.
In 2008, Remington shot at her then-husband, Gregory Remington, at their home in McMinnville, Oregon, because, she has claimed repeatedly in videos posted on social media, she said that he was creating child pornography. There is no evidence to back up these assertions.
She served 16 months in prison for the incident, but in recent years as the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies emerged, Remington’s claims took on a whole new life—especially when she added the claim that her former husband was working for the Clinton Foundation.
Her claims quickly became a focus of attention on the /qresearch/ board on 8chan in 2018, a message board that was the center of the QAnon universe. Believers spent a lot of time trying, and failing, to find any evidence to back up Remington’s claims.
“The Clinton Foundation Network is the largest child sex trafficking network in the entire world,” she claimed in a 2020 video posted on Twitter, echoing the widely held belief that Hillary Clinton was at the center of the global child sex trafficking conspiracy that QAnon was attempting to expose.
She even gave her former husband a nickname—“The Baby King”—which others in the QAnon community have continued to use in the years since.
“McDonalds is connected to the Clintons, they chop up the bodies and put them into the sausage and hamburgers,” Remington claimed. “People are being cannibalized. Look it up.” She also claims children’s body parts were being used to make Jolly Rancher and Sour Patch candies.
In another 2020 video, she claimed that she has “almost been killed, threatened, stalked, harassed, followed” for speaking out about the Clintons, adding that “the Illuminati chased me down.”
Those unhinged videos propelled Remington to a certain level of fame within the conspiracy world, with an archived version of her Twitter account showing she had almost 14,000 followers. In recent years, she has become involved with other prominent figures in the QAnon world and the sovereign citizen movement.
She has worked withTimothy Charles Holmseth, a QAnon promoter who claims to work for a secretive government agency called the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, which does not exist. Holmseth has been linked to efforts to kidnap children from child protective services.
In an affidavit she filed last year, Remington referenced the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force and once again claimed her ex-husband was making “child porn, baby porn and animal porn.”
Hill and Remington will appear in court next month, and in a post on Facebook on Tuesday night, Remington hinted that she may seek to use a sovereign citizen defense. “Sovereign Authority. Written Express TRUST who operates in Private Jurisdiction who has been violated on every level possible,” she wrote. “Thank you for all your help at this time…i need it IN JESUS CHRIST’S HOLY NAME I AM A US FEDERAL COURT WITNESS.”
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