Thomas Gounley

News-Leader

John Cornille had been with the Drug Enforcement Administration for seven years. Yet he couldn't wrap his head around what his informant was describing.

It was November 1992, and the man was talking about a visit to a home in Reeds Spring, Missouri. He said he'd been forced at gunpoint to use methamphetamine manufactured there. But something was off. The informant didn't mention beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners — none of the complex glassware Cornille was taught were part of meth labs.

Instead, the informant reported an unusual scene: Black trash bags stuffed with empty boxes of cold medicine. A mason jar full of kerosene, with something resembling a hockey puck settled at the bottom. Starter fluid. And a cookie sheet in the oven, with a yellowish cake on it.

Cornille, like other DEA agents, had made meth himself, under controlled circumstances, as part of his official duties. It was standard practice; the agency knew it meant he'd have more credibility when he asked a court for a search warrant or filled out a probable cause statement recommending criminal charges. It was important that prosecutors see him and other agents as experts on the manufacturing of illegal drugs.

As Cornille sat down to request a warrant for the Reeds Spring home, he couldn't be that authoritative. He needed another source, someone who could credibly link common household items with the production of meth, a highly-addictive substance known for its energy boost. He called a chemist working for the DEA in Chicago.

“I still remember what he said, because I wrote it down word for word," Cornille recalled in a recent interview. "He said, ‘There’s a basis for such a formula in literature, but it’s not been seen in the United States."

It's been nearly 25 years since the investigation, but that's not the only comment that remains lodged in Cornille's memory.

At some point, as the informant was describing the unusual lab in Reeds Spring, Cornille asked him if the meth was any good. If the answer was no, he figured, the situation might not be that big a deal. Low-quality stuff was unlikely to spread.

The informant, however, had five words for him:

"Best dope I ever had."

Three months later, in Springfield, Cornille sat across from a recently-arrested 49-year-old man.

With a voice recorder rolling, Cornille introduced himself for the record, then moved on to his guest.

“With me today is Mr. Bob Paillet,” Cornille said, according to a transcript. “Mr. Paillet has agreed to talk to me and explain to me different methods of manufacturing methamphetamine. One using the sodium metal and anhydrous ammonia and then a couple others.”

Cornille told Paillet — pronounced “Pie-ay” — that he wanted "just to sit down and talk to you about those different methods."

"How you discovered them, and so forth,” Cornille said.

Paillet began by saying he'd always been interested in chemistry and physics and that he'd "just played around with my chemistry set." Then he got detailed. He talked about molecules, replacement reactions and acetic acid, about catalysts, synthesis and hydroxyl groups. Scientific terms flowed with minimal prompting.

About halfway through the conversation, Paillet made a remark that fell somewhere between a suggestion and a prediction.

“You’re gonna have to send all your agents back to school and learn chemistry … There’s people out there that are going to great lengths to avoid getting caught,” he said.

Cornille responded. “Well, see I went to school to learn how to manufacture methamphetamine and to …”

Paillet cut him off.

“All the old ways,” he said.

Cornille joined the DEA in 1985 after serving on the local police force in Washington D.C. He spent the remainder of the decade in the nation's capital, fighting the crack epidemic. In 1990, he was transferred to southwest Missouri. At that point, Cornille recalls now, meth ranked about third on the agency's local priority list. Cocaine and marijuana were much more prevalent.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, however, the number of meth labs seized by the authorities drastically increased, first in Missouri, and gradually in other communities around the country. Before the decade was out, as the public and the media sought answers as to how the drug shifted from a problem to a crisis — how it grew powerful enough to ravage entire communities — law enforcement would point to Paillet by name.

"He brought it to life for this area," Springfield police Cpl. Dan Schrader told the News-Leader in 1998.

Paillet essentially converted the process of producing meth from a complex formula — one that required the so-called "cook" to have a chemistry background — to a simple recipe that could be followed by the masses. DEA and court records indicate Paillet taught his method to others, who in turn taught it within their own respective circles. The man behind the unusual meth lab in Reeds Spring learned the method from one of Paillet's friends, Cornille said.

Paillet wasn't a drug lord; he didn't control a network of associates. In fact, he did the opposite, spawning a generation of cooks by unintentionally democratizing an illegal industry. One textbook released in 2014 called Paillet "arguably the Johnny Appleseed for the spread of local meth production throughout the Midwest." Journalist Frank Owen, in his own book released in 2007, wrote that Paillet “effectively decentralized the local meth trade … broadening the appeal of the drug."

In other words, Bob Paillet reinvented meth.

How did he do it? The story he told law enforcement revolves around the Springfield campus of Missouri State University, which at the time was known as Southwest Missouri State.

“Bob claims he went to SMS’ library, and in a research manual he found this method of converting pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine using sodium metal as one of the catalysts," Cornille said. "He claimed that at the top of the page was a swastika.”

Thus the moniker: The new process was the "Nazi method." The new stuff, "Nazi dope."

“I really believe that his method, here in Springfield, was the bounce to get meth spread throughout the rest of Missouri and the United States," said Nick Console, who ran the DEA's Springfield office from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.

Despite Paillet's pioneering role in an American drug epidemic, relatively little has been known about him. In the later years of his life, he appears to have avoided public scrutiny, as well as further trouble with the law. He died in Texas, age 72, on Jan. 1, 2016.

Paillet's death and the passage of time have obscured some details. Other key elements — like his recipe's alleged connection to the Third Reich — have taken on the characteristics of urban legend.

Court documents obtained by the News-Leader shed light on his arrest and the early spread of the Nazi method. Interviews with family members and a key associate, none of whom have previously spoken publicly, paint a picture of a man with an obsession who left public officials scrambling to respond for years.

The probable cause statement used to charge Paillet, written by Cornille, traces his arrival on law enforcement's radar to Jan. 24, 1993 — just over a week before he was arrested.

That day, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office arrested two Springfield residents, Christopher Fricks and Kimberly Lee Duncan, for possession of a controlled substance and possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

It's not clear from court documents how or why Paillet's name came up as the two were taken into custody. What is clear is that they told deputies of two places where Paillet stored materials he used to make meth.

The first was a room in a house Fricks was renting in Joplin. Authorities searched it on Jan. 28. The second was a property near the small town of Morrisville, where Paillet previously lived. One of his ex-wives allowed law enforcement on the property on Feb. 1. Both tips were substantiated.

Then, on Feb. 2, a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper and Polk County deputies headed to Paillet's apartment on West 3rd Street in Battlefield. Paillet wasn't home, but his current wife was, and she began speaking to the men. She mentioned her husband would sometimes disappear for up to three weeks at a time, telling her he was working in Kansas City.

Midway through the conversation, Paillet drove up in a tan 1983 Chevy Cavalier. He walked inside, and set an unzipped black duffel bag on the floor. The grip of a pistol stuck out from the top, and the trooper quickly moved to secure the gun. It was loaded: Nineteen rounds, one in the chamber. Paillet said he'd traded for it.

The trooper and the deputies asked Paillet to talk outside. He said sure.

They walked out and the officers read Paillet his Miranda rights. According to court documents, Paillet “stated he was glad to see them and glad that it was over.”

Then he began to talk.

Standing outside his Battlefield, Missouri, home with a state trooper and several sheriff's deputies, Bob Paillet gave the men consent to search his vehicle.

He knew why they were there. Before they could open the door of his Chevy Cavalier, he told them what they'd find: methamphetamine, inside a small white pill bottle in the trunk. Once the drugs were retrieved, Paillet led the officers back inside and pointed out the two sawed-off shotguns under a bed.

The same day — Feb. 2, 1993 — the trooper and the Polk County deputies drove Paillet to the Missouri State Highway Patrol's regional headquarters on Kearney Street. There they were joined by John Cornille, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in Springfield.

Authorities found a note in Paillet's pocket, with a chemical formula written out. They also found two receipts, from trips to Walmart.

Shortly before dusk, after speaking with investigators, Paillet led the men to Room 431 of the American Inn Hotel in northeast Springfield, where he showed them the meth-making materials he had stashed there. Then they all drove across town to a storage facility in Battlefield, where he kept a second stash.

The News-Leader reported the bust two days later, with the headline "Police nail 'Nazi Dope' laboratory in Battlefield." The authorities said chemical disposal workers wearing special suits and protective gloves spent about three hours clearing the storage unit. They estimated disposing of the chemicals would cost the federal government $35,000.

The story noted that, nationwide, the number of meth lab busts had declined in recent years. But it also quoted the head of a local drug task force, with a premonition that would turn out to be spot on.

“This Nazi dope is definitely new to this area, and it could be the first in the U.S.,” said Steve Whitney, also the sheriff in nearby Christian County. “I still think we may see this more and more.”

Although credited with pioneering the so-called "Nazi method" of producing meth — and opening the door to an era of amateur meth labs across the Midwest — Paillet himself has remained something of a mystery.

News stories and a handful of books published in the decades since his 1993 arrest have presented scant detail: He moved from California to Missouri in the 1980s and, upon finding meth was more expensive than he was used to out west, set out to make it himself. He researched chemistry at the library at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He was arrested. He moved to Texas.

That narrative covers just a portion of his life.

Born on March 4, 1943, Robert Paillet was 72 when he died Jan. 1, 2016.

He left behind two daughters. In an email to the News-Leader, the oldest offered a theme for his biography:

"My father is a classic case of what PTSD does to a brilliant mind."

Speed. Crank. Dope. Ice. Zip. The poor man's cocaine.

Whatever you call it, meth is a stimulant that affects the central nervous system.

It's odorless, typically white and can be found in powder and crystal forms. In the United States, it has for decades been a schedule II substance, which means it has some very limited accepted medical uses — for conditions like attention deficit disorder and obesity, under the trade name Desoxyn — but also a high potential for abuse, as well as psychological or physical dependence.

One of the things that sets meth apart from other illegal substances is its means of production.

"Unlike other major drugs of abuse, methamphetamine is a synthetic drug, and as such, is manufactured in a laboratory," the DEA wrote in a 2016 report. "Methamphetamine does not rely on a plant as its main source and is not affected by drought, flooding, growth cycles, or other natural elements that affect production. Instead, methamphetamine production relies on the ability of traffickers to obtain precursors and other essential chemicals."

Meth is most commonly smoked, snorted or injected. Its use causes an increase in energy and alertness and a decrease in appetite. Meth also produces an intense euphoric rush, and can make users hypersexual. Cornille said the high from crack cocaine lasts for a matter for minutes. With meth, the high lasts for hours.

Meth can cause increased heart rate and blood pressure, tremors and convulsions and — particularly with repeated use — depression and motor and cognitive failure. Users also tend to not sleep for extended periods, which leads to additional detrimental effects.

Bob Paillet's death certificate lists his birthplace as San Diego. His oldest daughter, now 48, said her father was actually born on Canada's Vancouver Island, although his parents had previously lived in California.

Lisa Paillet — who spoke to the News-Leader on the condition that her real first name not be used — said Bob's father, Francis "Fred" Paillet, was a Vermont native and worked as a carpenter and master gardener. His mother, Quebec native Louise Marie Paillet, was a maid and cook.

The family moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas, when Bob was in junior high, then to the small town of Exeter, Missouri, about 60 miles southwest of Springfield, several years later. After graduating from Exeter High School in 1961, Bob enlisted in the Navy and was sent to California's Bay Area. He was taking forestry classes at the University of California-Berkeley when, in 1964, he was deployed to Vietnam on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger.

Lisa said her father returned to the United States with "debilitating migraines and a jaundiced view of the world," after a commanding officer "rode one of his crew members so hard" that he committed suicide. She believes Bob had post-traumatic stress disorder, although he was never formally diagnosed. For the most part, Lisa said, her father avoided talking about his time at war.

Upon his return home in 1965, Bob Paillet married Lisa’s mother, whom he met in Berkeley prior to his deployment. They briefly lived in Oakland before embarking on a year-long trip around the United States, ultimately ending in Kansas City. Over the next five years, Bob and his wife bounced back and forth between there and the Bay Area. Bob never returned to college.

Lisa was born in California in 1968. She said her father had an assortment of jobs over the years. Sometimes he flipped houses, or built new ones. He liked to purchase and restore antique cars, a lifelong passion of his, for resale. He wasn't always self-employed, however. When Lisa was born, he worked as a lineman for the phone company.

Around 1970, the family of three was living in Kansas City, where Bob worked for a fiberglass company. One day, he saw a friend and co-worker get electrocuted. It's a moment that "damaged" her father, Lisa said.

The family moved back to California, where Bob reconnected with a friend who was using meth. At some point, Lisa said, the friend got hold of a bad batch and became sick.

"So my father went to the Berkeley public library and the university library and started researching chemistry books," Lisa said.

Why chemistry books? Bob "wanted him to have clean drugs."

"That’s my father’s logic," she said. "Not get him off the drugs — but make them better.”

Within a few years, Lisa said, Bob became "really flaky and moody." Around 1973, at Bob's request, Lisa's mother gave her husband a year to travel and find himself. He took two. When Bob came back, the couple divorced.

"After that, I saw him off and on for camping trips, hiking, or things like roller skating," Lisa said. "It was a good compromise. I got to see him when he was in the mood to play. If he was not, he was not around. This basic relationship carried us through life."

The extent to which Bob used or produced meth in the ensuing years is unclear. Sometime during the two-year break, Lisa said, Bob met the woman who would become his second wife. His youngest daughter, Gena Paillet, was born in the Springfield area in 1978.

"I can remember I grew up terrified of him, because he would be one happy person one minute and literally in a second go to this terrifying person," Gena said.

By the time he was arrested with methamphetamine in the trunk of his car in 1993, Bob Paillet was on his third marriage.

He had fathered two children, born 10 years apart, in different states, to different women. The lives of his daughters, to this day, have had relatively little overlap.

Both women, however, have memories of living with their father on a plot of rural land along Highway JJ, not far from Morrisville, Missouri. The town of about 400 is 25 miles north of Springfield.

The remote venue in the anonymous rolling hills of the Ozarks appears to have been one place where Paillet refined the work that would later turn the meth trade on its head.

Gena Paillet, Bob's youngest daughter, lived there in the mid-1980s. She and her father had recently moved back to Missouri from California. Her mother, Bob's second wife, stayed behind in the Golden State for a year to work. Gena and her father lived in a modified school bus while Bob began building a house.

It was a simple setting. The bathroom for a time was an outhouse. But the property gave Gena, who says she grew up fearing her father, what she calls "some of the best memories of my life." There were dense woods to explore, and the property abutted the Little Sac River.

“We’d go swimming in that all the time and catch crawdads, things like that," Gena said. "I’ve thought about going back to that property."

Within a couple years, however, Bob and his second wife separated. Gena said her father was unfaithful and verbally abusive. She and her mother went to live in Morrisville.

Not long after, in 1987, Bob's oldest daughter, a product of his first marriage, arrived at the property.

Lisa Paillet — the first name is a pseudonym — grew up in California, where she was born in 1968. She saw her father only occasionally, but at times felt his presence even when he wasn't around. In high school, Lisa said, adults would sometimes show up and "imply that they knew my father and were supposed to watch out for me.”

Lisa came to live with her father as she prepared to attend Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He was footing the bill.

Three decades later, Lisa remembers the property as a place where her father experimented. Bob never said exactly what he was doing, and Lisa sensed it might be best if she didn't exactly know. She recalls helping her father hook together motors and going on shopping trips to Walmart to buy cold medicine.

"He would buy tons of that stuff, and he said it was easy for him to break down to get the chemicals he wanted," Lisa said.

Bob coached Lisa not to give her name to people. If somebody came looking for her father, she was supposed to deny that she knew him. Instead of guard dogs, the property near Morrisville had guard geese. The animals tend to raise a racket when they're disturbed.

"If you heard the geese and it was dark outside, you hit the lights and you hit the floor,” Lisa said.

There is some overlap in Lisa and Gena's memories. Both recall a room on the property where they weren't supposed to go. Gena distinctly remembers hiding behind a tree one day, on a weekend visit sometime after her parents separated, and watching her father go inside.

"I just remember seeing this one huge table ... with beakers and pots and things smoking and, you know, tubes going from one to the other," she said. "I didn’t know what it was, but I knew he was up to something. And by his behavior becoming much more erratic, we knew something was wrong. We just didn’t know what.”

By the 1980s, the U.S. meth trade — both manufacturing and distribution — was largely run by outlaw motorcycle gangs. In some places, it was the Hell's Angels. In Texas, it was the Bandidos.

Nick Console, a Louisiana native now living in Ash Grove, joined the DEA in 1983, and was soon working out of the agency's Houston office.

In an interview, Console said that meth labs back then were primarily located in out-of-the-way, rural areas, so the rotten egg smell produced during a cook wouldn't give the operation away. They were full of glassware, not unlike a scene from the hit TV series "Breaking Bad." The labs churned out batches of the drug measured in pounds.

Busts by the authorities would sometimes lead to shoot-outs. At times, cleaning up a lab consisted of dumping the chemicals in the nearest ditch, Console said. The Environmental Protection Agency had yet to sound the alarm. Nobody thought to wear a respirator.

“These labs, they were out in west Texas, they might be out in the boonies in an old mobile home, but everything in that mobile home was a lab," Console said.

Meth was big business for the bikers, and it required a specialized workforce, he said. The gangs employed their own chemists, who generally used what is known as the P2P method, in reference to its incorporation of phenylacetone, a chemical often used for industrial cleaning or photo processing purposes.

Back then, Console said, “you had to be a chemist to make meth.”

The meth trade's biker era bled into southwest Missouri. In 1987, Glennon Paul Sweet, a local member of the Hell's Angels-affiliated Galloping Goose motorcycle club, gunned down Highway Patrol Trooper Russell Harper during a routine traffic stop just outside Springfield. It was later determined Sweet, who was ultimately put to death, was transporting meth.

The wooded hollows of southern Missouri once attracted moonshiners. By the late 1980s, the region's rural nature and sparse law enforcement presence were seen as ideal for making meth. DEA officials reported that manufacturers were buying or leasing farmhouses and converting them into P2P labs. Still, they were few and far between; Cornille said agents typically came across a couple of labs per year.

After being transferred from Houston, Console worked for the DEA overseas in Turkey, then in San Francisco. In the fall of 1994, about a year and a half after Paillet's arrest, he arrived in Springfield as the DEA's new resident agent in charge.

“When I got here, it was the beginning of the spike in meth labs," he said.

Lisa Paillet doesn't believe her father was ever in a motorcycle gang. But Bob definitely associated with some shady types.

"I know that when I was in circles of people that I would consider very bad people, he was known in California,” she said.

Lisa also said her father "would have hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash sometimes, and then he would have nothing."

Either way, Paillet had no prior criminal record when, in January 1993, he became a person of interest to law enforcement agencies in southwest Missouri. The authorities had encountered a new type of meth lab — using what became known as the "Nazi method" — in the town of Reeds Spring just a couple months earlier.

In DEA records reviewed by the News-Leader, Paillet said he was the one who discovered the new process, but never specifically stated when that happened. Evidence suggests, however, that it was years before his arrest.

The Reeds Spring lab wasn't the first of its kind. A Nazi method-style lab was found in 1988 in a trailer park in Vacaville, California, according to a 1990 article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Authorities later came to believe Paillet was behind the lab — a conclusion that appears supported by his numerous connections to the state.

The Nazi method starts with the compound pseudoephedrine, which, chemically speaking, is one oxygen atom removed from methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in cold medicines sold under brand names such as Sudafed.

Here’s how a former DEA chemist described the ensuing process:

To make meth, the manufacturer pulverizes the pseudoephedrine pills in a coffee grinder, creating a fine powder that is placed in a coffee filter. Methyl alcohol, in the form of something like windshield washer fluid, is poured over it, and then evaporated out.

The cook then adds ether, anhydrous ammonia - a compound commonly used by farmers as fertilizer – and sodium metal or lithium metal, which can be stripped from commercial batteries. That produces a liquid called meth oil.

More ether is added, and the solution is put through another coffee filter. A bubbler is then used to convert rock salt and other material to hydrogen chloride gas, which converts the meth oil into a white powder. Meth.

The Nazi method is also sometimes referred to as the Birch method because it builds upon the Birch reduction, a reaction first reported in 1944 by the Australian chemist Arthur Birch.

The significance of the Nazi method was how simple it was. When DEA agent John Cornille gave talks to community members, he'd compare it to baking a cake.

“Bob made meth a recipe anyone could follow,” he said.

The Nazi method produced small amounts of the drug, not the big batches typically cooked up in rural "superlabs." But unlike previous manufacturing methods, Nazi dope didn't require an open heat source. It involved fewer steps, and took less time.

"From start to finish, you could probably do it in an hour," Cornille said.

Additionally, the chemicals involved were legal, and often easy to obtain. It takes hundreds of pseudoephedrine pills to make a half ounce of meth. But purchasing cold medicine in vast quantities didn't raise eyebrows in the early 1990s.

"At that time, if someone came in and bought 10 boxes of pseudoephedrine, Walgreens was happy," Cornille said.

Bob Paillet ordered a pecan waffle with extra butter and a glass of milk, then settled into the booth at a north Springfield Waffle House. He was wearing a wire.

After being arrested on Feb. 2, 1993, the Springfield-area resident told the authorities that he'd taught his new recipe for methamphetamine — the so-called "Nazi method" — to a friend. Now, less than 24 hours later, Paillet, 49, was killing time reading the newspaper, waiting for that man to arrive. Drug Enforcement Administration agent John Cornille and a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper were listening from a van parked nearby.

"Hey, late as usual," Paillet said as Mike Poplawski, 34, arrived.

A transcript of the conversation that took place over breakfast — obtained from the DEA under the Freedom of Information Act — is heavily redacted, with Poplawski's comments completely blacked out.

By the time they parted ways, however, Poplawski had given Paillet 279 milligrams of meth, according to court documents. The wire caught everything.

The next day, Cornille and the trooper showed up at Poplawski's home on South Newton Street.

Poplawski was cooperative. He invited the officers in, and, when told there was an ongoing investigation that involved him, admitted that he cooked meth, according to court documents. He showed the trooper a baggie of the drug inside his wallet, and then took them to another apartment where he stored lab equipment and precursor chemicals.

Later, at the DEA office, Poplawski confirmed he'd been taught by Paillet how to make meth using the Nazi method.

In a recent interview, Poplawski, now 59, said he first met Paillet in 1979.

Rollerskating was the thing to do back then, and "we were both hotdoggers," Poplawski said, using a term for those fond of showing off. The pair — 35 and 21 years old — met at a north Springfield rink. Poplawski said they were among the first in the city to purchase jogger skates, basically tennis shoes with big, brightly-colored wheels.

Poplawski said he believes Paillet might've smoked a little pot back then, and he drank, but he didn't do anything harder. Then Paillet left for California. When he returned, he was into meth. And Poplawski was, too.

He attempted to describe his relationship with Paillet back then.

"Friend?" he said. "No. Associate. Close associate."

It's unclear from court records when Paillet taught Poplawski the Nazi method. Poplawski declined to clarify the timeline.

Poplawski did state that, sometime in 1992, there'd been what might be called a misunderstanding between the pair. Paillet asked Poplawski to stop giving meth to a mutual friend of theirs. Poplawski complied. The friend complained to Paillet, who by that point had forgotten his earlier directive and became angry at Poplawski. The two stopped talking.

Then six or eight months later, there was a phone call. And a request to meet at the Waffle House along North Kansas Expressway. From Poplawski's perspective, it seemed an effort to repair the rift.

Sitting in the living room of his east Springfield home, Poplawski briefly looked over the redacted transcript of the conversation that day. Some of it was small talk, he said. Mostly, Paillet was "crying about hurting, wanting some speed."

It's been nearly a quarter century since the conversation, and Poplawski doesn't have a single positive thing to say about Paillet.

The man was chauvinistic, he said. A shorter guy with "a big man's want for power," someone who walked around "like a bantam rooster." A guy who "hit on every woman that he come across, no matter what." And a man whose defining obsession — all speeders have one, Poplawski said — was "his process," the way he made his dope.

"He experimented on people," Poplawski said. "He’d change the formula a little bit and then give it to junkies he knew’d take it and ask no questions, and then watch their reactions. This is the guy that DEA worked with."

As Poplawski looked at the transcript, he wouldn't even agree with Paillet's remark that he showed up to the Waffle House late.

“I’m more on time than anybody I know,” he said.

The authorities didn't stop with Poplawski.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on July 26, 1993, Cornille and three other law enforcement officers parked their vehicles in rural Webster County, with a barn in sight. They were investigating the latest appearance of Nazi dope. Cornille remembers hearing coyotes howl.

"Having moved from D.C. to here, it was a bit of a change for me," he said.

Earlier in the day, an informant told a Springfield police detective that a man named Frank Wright was planning to cook meth at the barn, which was owned by an associate, Gary Davis. The men would start once the sun went down, the informant said, to take advantage of lower humidity levels. The informant indicated Wright drove a green Dodge van. It was parked by the barn.

Investigators would later learn that, earlier that afternoon, Davis heard that a friend with a similar vehicle was stopped by the DEA. Davis became nervous and told Wright to "burn the barn" if agents showed up.

Around 10 p.m., the van started up. It drove off the property, headed west. Cornille and the others followed and initiated a traffic stop.

Wright agreed to a search. The van was clean. But the officers found a cigarette pack with a small amount of meth on Wright himself. They read him his rights.

Wright admitted to the authorities that he was planning to cook meth, and said he was placing supplies inside the barn. It was to have been something of a trade, court documents indicate. Davis, in exchange for providing the setting for the cook, was to receive two "eight balls" — the term for an eighth of an ounce — and be allowed to assist in production, so as to learn the new method himself.

Wright was arrested. The barn, by all accounts, escaped unharmed.

Davis contacted the DEA a week later. He admitted to knowing about plans for the cook and said he'd participated in an earlier one.

Wright, in turn, contacted the DEA in mid-August. He said he'd been introduced to meth about 18 months prior when he was at Poplawski's home. Paillet showed up to deliver the drug. Wright said he started doing work on Paillet's vehicle, and his involvement gradually grew, until he was loading and unloading chemicals and driving Paillet around while he distributed meth.

Wright told the DEA that Poplawski taught him to make meth. He described it as a somewhat formal process that entailed assisting with three cooks. (Poplawski, in a recent interview, denied ever teaching anyone the Nazi method).

The hardest ingredient to obtain was sodium metal, Wright told the DEA, so he figured out a way to manufacture it himself, using lye, an electric stove, jumper cables and a 12-volt car battery.

How did Wright come up with the workaround? Perhaps his time with Paillet influenced him.

"In late June, 1993, or early July, 1993, Wright did research into the manufacture of sodium metal at Southwest Missouri State University," court documents say.

Paillet, Poplawski, Wright and Davis were indicted by a federal grand jury on Oct. 8. 1993, along with two others, Kenneth and Sybil Allen. Court documents say Poplawski sold meth to, and purchased meth from, the couple. The charge against Sybil Allen was later dropped.

None of them were rich, at least as far as the court knew. Financial affidavits indicate that Poplawski was the only one employed in a traditional sense, bringing home $280 a week. Paillet and the others were listed as self-employed or unemployed, with minimal assets.

Three of the men had a record. Poplawski had been convicted in 1978 of felony robbery in Phelps County. Two others had stealing and drug offenses.

The men all initially pleaded not guilty and bonded out of jail. Dates were set for jury trials. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were being made for plea agreements.

Between mid-December and early January 1994, all five pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture and distribute meth. In exchange, additional charges against some of them, for physically manufacturing or possessing the drug, were dropped.

With Paillet and his co-conspirators rounded up, the authorities could have been excused for thinking they'd nipped the nascent meth-making boom in the bud. But they were soon disappointed. The recipe for Nazi dope was no longer a secret.

The inaugural class of those involved with "Nazi dope" was sentenced in Springfield in the spring of 1994.

There was Bob Paillet, who told authorities he was the pioneer behind the new meth labs popping up in southwest Missouri; Mike Poplawski, to whom Paillet taught his new method; Frank Wright, who said he learned it from Poplawski; Gary Davis, who arranged to learn it from Wright; and Kenneth Allen, who bought meth from, and sold meth to, Poplawski.

Allen, who tested positive for using drugs while on bond, was sentenced to three years probation.

Davis also used meth while on bond and traveled without permission out of the state. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Poplawski was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

If the sentencing guidelines at the time were followed, Wright would've faced something similar — between six to seven years behind bars. Prosecutors, however, told the judge he provided "substantial assistance" in the prosecution of Poplawski. So he was sentenced to about three years in prison, followed by a similar amount of probation.

Then there was Paillet, who received the best deal of them all.

Using the sentencing guidelines, prosecutors calculated Paillet's "total offense level" to be 31. That would correspond with nine to 11 years behind bars. The prosecutors, however, wrote that "defendant agreed to fully cooperate with the government." He was credited with assisting in obtaining the guilty pleas of the others: Poplawski, Allen, Wright and Davis.

Additionally, the prosecutors wrote that Paillet "provided significant information concerning the origin of this particular method of making methamphetamine."

"Defendant fully admitted that he first devised this method of making methamphetamine, and it was through him that the method was related to other 'cooks' in the southwest Missouri area," they wrote.

Paillet was sentenced to five years of probation. He also attended a drug treatment program. While there, he received a letter from his oldest daughter, living in California.

"Surprise, Surprise," she wrote. "If I would have known you could do things like that I would have asked for help with my chemistry homework."

Nearly a quarter century later, Poplawski doesn't understand how Paillet didn't spend a day in prison.

“This was the man that experimented on people, and the DEA worked with him," Poplawski said. "I’m a little burnt about that, still. It still rises my anger a bunch. Not that I was interested in working with them myself, don’t get me wrong, and not that I wasn’t involved, don’t get me wrong there. But I was not the man on top. I was not the man to hit for the heavy sentence.”

Poplawski was implicated when Paillet wore a wire to their meeting at a north Springfield Waffle House. Poplawski told the News-Leader the pair never spoke after that day, except for one comment when they found themselves in the same courtroom.

"No hard feelings," Paillet told the man who had once been his friend. Poplawski, flabbergasted, didn't respond.

"If I could’ve shot lightning out of my eyes, he’d have been a pile of flesh, a pile of ash, in a heartbeat," Poplawski said. "He just cost me five years. He cost me five years.”

There's something about calling a drug recipe the "Nazi method" that attracts attention.

A few days after Paillet was arrested in February 1993, the News-Leader wrote about the bust. A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration was quoted saying that "people give their drugs all kind of names."

"Just because it was made by German soldiers during World War II and now is called 'Nazi drugs' has no meaning to us," the spokeswoman said. "It's a nothingness. It only means that the producers don't have to use the usual ingredients, that they can make it without the regular methods. It's dangerous, no matter what you call it or how you make it."

There's a problem with the spokeswoman's response — one that's been replicated in many subsequent discussions of the Nazi method. It implied there's a direct link between Paillet's recipe and the Third Reich. But is there? After reviewing the available evidence, the News-Leader found the connection, while compelling, is tenuous.

Researchers have delved into German use of meth during World War II. Temmler, a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company, introduced meth in pill form under the brand name Pervitin in 1938, according to a 2005 report in the news magazine Der Spiegel. By 1940, millions of pills were being shipped to the front lines, resulting "in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed."

Germany wasn't alone in exploiting new substances with minimal consideration for side effects. The United States and British supplied service members with tablets of Benzedrine, an amphetamine, during the same period. Both were viewed as particularly valuable for pilots, who needed to remain alert on long bombing raids.

The large-scale manufacture of Pervitin pills in German factories, however, stands in stark contrast to Paillet's method, which resulted in small amounts of a powdered version of the drug. Which raises the question: If the method wasn't the same, how did meth produced in southwest Missouri end up referencing a fascist state?

In an interview, DEA agent John Cornille said that Paillet told him he learned the Nazi method by researching in the library at what was then Southwest Missouri State University. Cornille said Paillet indicated he came across a book or a document with a swastika on it.

Those two particular claims aren't found in the hundreds of pages of federal court and DEA records reviewed for this story. The DEA records, which were heavily redacted, do include one conversation in which Cornille asked Paillet if he looked "this stuff up in a book or something." The response, however, contradicts the notion that there was one all-important document.

"OK, I have a lot of books," Paillet said. "I have gone through the library, many libraries and read lots of books, hundreds of 'em. Ah, involving many phrases of chemistry."

Cornille asked what books "originally kinda gave you this idea that maybe this thing could work."

"I can’t say that it was any one in particular," Paillet responded.

Cornille told the News-Leader he believes most of the backstory Paillet gave regarding his discovery. However, he said the DEA tried to determine the exact book that contributed to Paillet's breakthrough, but came up empty-handed.

“I believe he found it in a book at SMS," Cornille said. "But the swastika thing — they looked far and wide.”

The man who did the searching says it's a little more complicated than that.

Terry Dal Cason retired from a 40-year-career as a forensic chemist with the DEA in 2011. He told the News-Leader that, back in the mid-1990s, his colleagues in the world of meth lab analysis didn't talk vaguely about a cook in southwest Missouri coming across a book or document with a swastika on it, as Cornille does now.

Instead, Dal Cason said, they specifically mentioned a "Nazi patent." Some of his colleagues stated as fact that the cook came across a patent that contained the exact recipe for Nazi dope. But Dal Cason wanted proof.

"People kept talking about this patent, and I was trying to get a copy of it," he said.

Dal Cason ended up with two theories. In 1997, he laid them out in an article for a little-known DEA publication called Microgram.

Theory one:

Dal Cason wrote that "one of the earliest groups" to make Nazi dope compiled packets of documents that included instructions for the method, and hid them away from their lab sites. If the lab was busted, the hidden packets insured they'd still have a written copy of the recipe somewhere, Dal Cason wrote.

What does that have to do with the name? "The top page of the synthesis 'packets' was a photocopy of a drawing from the cover of a video cassette case of the Third Reich propaganda film, 'Triumph des Willens,'" Dal Cason wrote.

"Triumph of the Will," the English translation of the title, was commissioned by Hitler. The drawing Dal Cason referred to shows an eagle clutching a wreath containing a swastika.

Dal Cason wrote in 1997 that "it is relatively easy to postulate how the seizure of these packets could present an opportunity to misinterpret a relationship between the most recognizable of NAZI symbols and the Li (or Na)/NH3 reduction procedure contained in the packets."

"From this point it is easy to imagine a 'word of mouth' genesis of the 'Nazi patent' myth," he wrote.

The documents and court records reviewed by the News-Leader do note materials seized in connection with the investigation of Paillet and his associates, but don't mention the German propaganda film. Dal Cason told the News-Leader he didn't recall the specific individuals who apparently hid the packets. The footnotes of his Microgram article reference cases filed in federal court in 1996, years after Paillet was arrested and the Nazi dope moniker was first used.

Theory two:

Dal Cason also asked a colleague in the United Kingdom to search German patents. Those published from 1932 to 1945 were topped with the "Imperial Eagle," a coat of arms depicting an eagle perched on wreath containing a swastika (similar, but not identical, to imagery on Triumph Des Willens).

Leslie King, head of the Forensic Science Service's Drugs Intelligence Laboratory, wrote Dal Cason in October 1996, and said he failed to find a patent for the technique Paillet used.

There were, however, patents that were somewhat related. Dal Cason said the packets mentioned in his first theory contained not just a recipe for the Nazi method, but also instructions for another process using methcathinone.

Dal Cason said King found a German patent from 1936 which provided techniques for synthesizing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine using methcathinone.

"The chemical names 'Ephedrinen' and 'Pseudoephedrine' are easily recognized among the German wording of the patent," Dal Cason wrote. "Misinterpretation of the patent's content, combined with a clandestine laboratory having chemicals appropriate for the Li(Na)/NH3 method, might easily lead to the assumption that this process was described in the patent."

To be clear, however, the patent wasn't describing the method Paillet used. And to Dal Cason's knowledge, no one ever found a copy of the German patent in connection with a lab bust — it's something for which Dal Cason had to search.

The audience for Microgram, where Dal Cason's article appeared, was largely limited to law enforcement. An editor's note attached to the piece read: "If anyone has hard evidence that a 'NAZI' patent does exist, please contact the Microgram editor." Dal Cason never heard from anyone.

Poplawski, for his part, offered a third theory.

In an interview, he said Paillet "wasn't smart enough to invent" the method, and that he must have gotten the recipe from someone else. Poplawski also said he never heard Paillet or any of his associates use the phrases 'Nazi method" or "Nazi dope."

“The first time we heard it the DEA threw it out there, and we had no idea what they were talking about,” he said.

Why does all this matter? Words stir emotion. Dan Viets — a defense attorney based in Columbia, Missouri — told the News-Leader that, by the late 1990s, prosecutors were brandishing the Nazi method moniker "as a weapon" in front of juries, taking advantage of the average person's extreme dislike of Nazis.

Viets considers the term "obviously prejudicial," particularly given the the lack of an established connection between Paillet's method and actual Nazis.

"The cops liked to say that as many times as they could in a courtroom," he said.

The sentencing of Paillet and his associates didn't stop use of the Nazi method.

Instead, the opposite occurred. The small-scale labs began to proliferate.

At first, most state and local officials, such as the average rural county sheriff's office, didn't have the training to safely deal with meth labs. Instead, they'd call the DEA. As the 1990s progressed, Cornille says he began feeling like a firefighter, rushing from small blaze to small blaze without time to investigate their causes. Instead of fires, of course, it was meth labs — although the explosions the labs sometimes prompted could end up blurring the distinction.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol, contacted by the News-Leader this fall, could only find records regarding the number of meth lab incidents in the state annually dating back to 1996. That year, according to the patrol, there were 121 labs found.

That figure increased to 319 in 1997. Then 480 in 1998. Then 615 in 1999.

"Once everything got rolling, it spread like wildfire," said Nick Console, who led the DEA's Springfield office for about a decade starting in 1994.

(A meth lab doesn't have to be operational when it is discovered to be counted in state or federal tallies of "meth lab incidents." Those tallies generally also count situations when authorities seize materials used to make meth, or find sites where lab waste material has been discarded.)

Cornille said he recalls Paillet telling him that he taught five people his method for Nazi dope.

“My initial thought was if we could get those five, we could make an impact," Cornille said. "But it didn’t work. Maybe we didn’t get one or we didn’t get to them fast enough.”

Console said he spent the mid-to-late 1990s trying to warn DEA leadership in Washington D.C. that what was happening in southwest Missouri was a serious situation, one that could get worse if unchecked. He says the leaders didn't feel a sense of urgency.

"We’re trying to tell them — it’s not heroin, it’s not cocaine," Console said. "It’s not a major organization, like a biker gang, that’s producing large amounts of methamphetamine. It’s Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith down here, and the Johnsons over here, making a half ounce. In their eyes, that wasn’t a problem. That was a local problem. It wasn’t a national problem."

The spread of the Nazi method meant that a drug once manufactured in large quantities by "superlabs" situated away from populated areas was now being produced on a small scale within towns and cities.

Console said he can tell stories all day about unusual busts.

There was the time agents executed a search warrant and noticed bullet holes in the ceiling of a bedroom. When they asked the home's resident why, the man said he knew the agents were monitoring him from his attic, so he shot at them while he laid in bed. The agents hadn't been to the house previously.

“Think about being up without sleep for seven days," Console says. "Think about it. Where would your mind be, where would your body be? So they’d become very paranoid.”

There was the man in Joplin whose lab exploded, the force of it enough to embed sodium metal in his skin. Sodium metal reacts when it comes in contact with water. When someone went to clean the man's body with a saline solution at the hospital, the sodium metal exploded — the "pops" sounding like a miniature fireworks display.

Then there were the deformed chickens. Agents responded to a farm in Christian County where large tanks of anhydrous ammonia were buried in the barn. The stuff wasn't being used as fertilizer.

"He had chickens with double beaks, he had chickens that were a foot growing out of another foot," Console said. "All the chemicals they were using — they were making meth there for a long time — were being dumped all over the area where the chickens were being raised.

In 1998, the man credited with pioneering the so-called "Nazi method" of methamphetamine production was contacted by a News-Leader reporter.

Bob Paillet had moved to Texas from southwest Missouri several years prior, not long after being sentenced for conspiring to manufacture and distribute the drug. He was still on probation.

It appears to be Paillet's only published interview. He expressed regret to reporter Laura Bauer.

"I never thought it would spread like this," he said. " ... I don't travel in those circles anymore."

In the years after his arrest, Paillet also wrote several letters to — and once spoke on the phone with — John Cornille, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated him.

"I can remember him expressing remorse that he had started 'this mess,' as he referred to it," Cornille said.

By the turn of the new millennium, Nazi dope was no longer a Missouri-specific phenomenon.

In north Texas, the commander of an 11-county narcotics task force told a magazine in 2001 that the unit came across its first Nazi lab three years prior. By the following summer, the task force was busting one every week.

"It has exploded on the scene so quick, it's so easy to do, and there are so many people involved in manufacturing it, that it has completely overtaxed our capabilities," the commander said.

In Illinois, a state police representative said in November 2000 that meth labs were "getting to the epidemic stage." He cited the fact that the state was on track to have 400 lab busts by the end of the year. Within four years, Illinois would be logging more than 1,500 labs annually.

In California, the Modesto Bee reported in 2000 that officials in the Central Valley had encountered eight labs using the Nazi method, and that "five of them were traced to a man from Missouri who had moved into a trailer park near Fresno and was teaching this method."

Officials in numerous other communities around the country reported a version of the same thing.

Nick Console, the former head of Springfield's DEA office, said top agency officials did little to respond to the growth in small-scale labs in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, he said, that began to change, as politicians representing affected communities began putting pressure on the agency.

“It took ‘em a good eight to 10 years," Console said. "And the damage was already done, it’d already spread.”

The Nazi method didn't just spread cook to cook. Its rise coincided with the early days of the modern internet and anonymous forums like The Hive, where users traded information about illegal substances.

"There were a number of really good dope sites," said Terry Dal Cason, a retired DEA forensic chemist who investigated the origins of the Nazi method moniker.

Since 2002, the DEA has published an annual report called the "National Drug Threat Assessment," which details the prevalence of illegal drugs in the United States.

Each year, the agency asks various state and local law enforcement agencies what they consider the "greatest drug threat" in their community. In 2003, 33.1 percent of agencies selected cocaine. Methamphetamine was second, with 31 percent.

The report stated that meth was widely available in the western and central United States and gradually becoming more available in the eastern United States. It concluded, however, that “despite the rising threat, methamphetamine is not likely to surpass the overall threat posed to the United States by powder cocaine and crack in the near term.”

Two years later, it did.

The 2005 report read: "According to state and local law enforcement agencies, the threat associated with methamphetamine trafficking and abuse has increased sharply since 2002 and now exceeds that of any other drug."

To be clear, the Nazi method wasn't the only way meth consumed in America was produced. In its annual reports, the DEA largely focused on other sources.

First, there was the foreign supply; meth was smuggled into the United States from Mexico and, to a much lesser extent, southeast Asia.

Then there were the domestic "superlabs" — those capable of producing 10 pounds of meth in a single day. In 2001, federal authorities seized 303 of them, two-thirds of which were located in California. The California labs alone likely produced more meth than all other domestic laboratories combined, the DEA wrote.

There was regional variation, however. In 2002, the agency wrote that "local independents account for as much as 80 percent of retail methamphetamine distribution in some areas of the country,” specifically the central United States. The Nazi method was a key process used, but there were also other recipes, like the "Red-P" method named for the required red phosphorous.

The DEA struggled to accurately detail the problem. In 2004, the agency wrote that meth use and distribution in the Midwest was "very high" in rural and suburban areas, but "less so in metropolitan areas, where most drug consequence data are collected."

"Therefore, available drug consequence data for methamphetamine use in the Central States likely under-represents the problem, perhaps significantly," the agency wrote.

Small labs accounted for much of the drug's impact on communities, which was felt in burn units and mental health clinics, courtrooms and cemeteries. While the Nazi method simplified meth production, it didn't make it foolproof. The more labs, and the more cooks, the more opportunities for something to go wrong, and the greater the cost of cleanup.

In 2003, there were 361 reported fires and explosions at meth lab sites, and 255 law enforcement officers were injured responding, according to the DEA. The agency spent $16.3 million on laboratory cleanup that fiscal year, eight times more than it spent less than a decade earlier.

That same year, the DEA reported that 893 children were present when meth labs were seized. About two-thirds tested positive for toxic levels of chemicals in their bodies. The agency said "child neglect and abuse are common within families whose parents or caregivers produce or use methamphetamine."

“The devastation and the damage to kids … I understand why Bob had regret," Cornille said.

Nationwide, meth lab busts peaked in 2004, when there were nearly 24,000 seizures.

Almost 3,000 of them were in Missouri. Two years earlier, the number of meth lab busts in the state passed those in California — the birthplace of the methamphetamine industry — for the first time. Since then, Missouri has led the nation most years, never dropping below third in annual busts. In some parts of the country, the area code for southwest Missouri, 417, is said to be slang for meth, or a particular type.

Cornille and Console both acknowledge that if Paillet hadn't introduced the Nazi method, someone else might have done so a short time later. Just like any legal industry, there is a steady pace of innovation in the world of illegal drugs, typically in response to some government crackdown.

To combat meth in the early 2000s, laws were implemented requiring medications containing pseudoephedrine to be sold from behind the counter. In 2007, fewer than 7,000 meth labs were seized across the country.

But makers and users adjusted, developing what became known as "one-pot" or "shake-and-bake" meth production, in which just a couple of pseudoephedrine pills are mixed in a 2-liter soda bottle for smaller batches. The new method led to another spike — 15,000 national meth lab busts in 2010.

Console said he views these newer methods as just continued innovation. The Nazi method was the truly critical shift, he said — the one that turned meth consumers into producers.

After they were sentenced for conspiring to manufacture and distribute meth, those indicted alongside Paillet struggled to stay on the right side of the law.

Kenneth Allen, who was given three years probation, ended up behind bars after he repeatedly tested positive for meth; he was also arrested for driving with a revoked license and failing to support his dependents.

Michael Poplawski, sentenced to nearly six years in prison, later completed community service for patronizing a prostitute in the early 2000s, according to online court records. He pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana, with intent to distribute, in 2012.

Gary Davis, sentenced to five years in prison, briefly escaped in August 1994 from the Kansas facility where he was incarcerated. His sentence was later reduced for aiding in the prosecution of two others, but he ultimately ended up back behind bars. Davis is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary in Texas for, among other things, stealing explosive materials and conspiring to use them to rob a bank, according to a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Court records indicate that Paillet never violated parole. There is no evidence he got in trouble with the law during the rest of his life.

Paillet found work after he moved to Texas in the mid-1990s. His youngest daughter said he was a CNC programmer, developing the programs that run automated machining equipment. His oldest daughter, however, said Paillet did sales and technical installations for a company.

By the end of the decade, health problems prompted him to go on disability, and he talked about having dystonia, a neurological disorder characterized by uncontrollable and sometimes painful muscle spasms.

Court records indicate Paillet divorced his third wife in 2008. He spent the final years of his life living with another woman in a trailer park in Sherman, a city of about 40,000 an hour north of Dallas.

In 2014, Stephanie Denton, 37, moved into the unit next to Paillet. Within a few months, she and Paillet — now in his early 70s — were drinking coffee together every morning.

Denton was having issues in her relationship, and her son was having legal troubles; Paillet encouraged her to be more positive, she said. From what Denton could tell, her neighbor didn't really have close friends.

Paillet didn't talk about his past very much, Denton said. She knew he was a Vietnam vet — Paillet talked about the war being pointless — and that he'd been involved with drugs to a degree. She said he claimed he'd sold drugs to raise money for a school for disabled kids.

Paillet was more inclined to talk about the government, with a bent more paranoid than partisan. Denton said he repeated a well-known conspiracy theory that claims the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to imprison citizens in camps after the imposition of martial law. Paillet's minimal online presence included posts about a group advocating for the secession of the state of Texas.

Paillet also had an extensive rock collection and talked and posted online about searching for gold on a claim in Colorado. He appears to have become obsessed with the process, not unlike his days of manufacturing meth.

“He first really started talking about gold mining after he was arrested," his oldest daughter Lisa Paillet said. "One of the things that he was really very interested in doing was separating gold from rock, so not mining in the river, but using chemistry to remove gold from rock without requiring massive amounts of water."

Lisa said her father's health issues worsened during the final years of his life, and that he appeared to be struggling with dementia at times. In what would end up being her last conversation with her father, he talked about his will.

Bob Paillet didn't leave a suicide note.

Early in the afternoon of Jan. 1, 2016, the 72-year-old drove his red Dodge truck from the mobile home park where he lived in Sherman, Texas, to a nearby hospital. It was a little over a mile. Then, he took a gun — "he had a lot of guns," said his daughter Gena — walked to the front of the vehicle, and shot himself in the head. He died minutes later in the emergency room.

Paillet's family held a memorial service after his death. To the outside world, however, the only acknowledgement of his passing can be found on the website of a Denison, Texas, funeral home. It's not really an obituary, just a name and a pair of dates.

There's a guest book option on the site. One person — Paillet's second wife, Gena's mother — has left a message: "We had a lot of happy years together. You will be missed. Your pain is over, ours now begins."

Otherwise, there was nothing in the public record acknowledging that the man credited with reinventing methamphetamine production in the U.S. was dead. All in all, it probably turned out about how Paillet would have wanted it.

In 1998, he spoke briefly with a News-Leader reporter, the only time he was ever quoted in the media. At the time, meth lab busts were drastically increasing across the central United States. Authorities were blaming the phenomenon on the ease of the "Nazi method," and said Paillet pioneered it while living in the Springfield area.

In that interview, Paillet expressed regret, as well as a wish regarding his future.

"I hope my name is forgotten or it's put in the back of people's minds," he said.

Perhaps Paillet found some measure of peace. In an interview, Gena said that, while growing up, she was not allowed to talk or ask about the concept of a God around her father. In his later years, however, Bob Paillet softened on that view.

In 2008, he wrote on online message boards that "I was an atheist, then agnostic, and now I believe that there is a God." He also said that he believed in evolution, and expressed a degree of incredulity that there are individuals who do not.

"He was still a scientific man, but he found his version of God,” Gena said.

Gena, 38, came of age in a world that her father helped create.

Growing up in Morrisville, she "never really fit in," she said, and started drinking at an early age. When Gena and her mother moved to Springfield, she "immediately just fell in with the wrong crowd." She graduated from Springfield's Parkview High School in 1996.

"A lot of people believe that addiction is genetic," Gena said. "I am my father's daughter, not just in that way, but every way that there is."

Gena said she used meth for the first time at age 15. Two years later, she met Steven Joseph Brown, the man who would become her husband.

"He used needles, and he shot me up for the first time with heroin, and it was pretty much over from there," she said. "It was always either that or meth. There was like a two-year period where I probably never slept. It’s been a struggle for me ever since."

Brown — who died in February 2016 — was 16 years older than Gena. Prior to meeting her, he gave Gena's father precursor chemicals in exchange for meth, she said. At one point, he was even arrested by John Cornille, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who investigated Bob.

“My husband kind of ended up learning my dad’s recipe," Gena said. "Not anywhere near as good as my dad.”

Gena, who said she grew up fearing her father, first got in trouble for drugs when she was 17. She thought her father was going to kill her. Instead, she said, he "became my best friend ever, because we understood each other."

"My mom — I love my mom — she’s never done a drug in her life," Gena said. "She’s had maybe one speeding ticket, and I think she even got that dismissed. Really this connection grew between him and me that was just amazing. I could really do no wrong in his eyes.”

Gena said that between her late teens and late 2015, she was only "clean" for extended periods twice, when she became pregnant. "But I always went pretty much right back."

In late December 2015, Gena said, she overdosed on heroin. Gena's mother, who she lived with at the time, kicked her out of her house. Gena called her father, who paid for a motel room for a week, and indicated she should come live with him in Texas.

"He said, 'I want you to go to your parole officer and start getting everything transferred down here and I want you to come back here,' and he said, 'I will get you through this,'" Gena said.

Two days later, she got the call that her father was dead.

Gena said she traveled to Texas to attend her father's memorial service, but got in a dispute with the woman Bob was living with at the time of his death, and ended up leaving beforehand (Lisa Paillet described her half-sister as "high as a kite" at the time). Gena expressed regret that she didn't receive something her father wanted her to have — "this metal container thing that his very first successful batch of stuff was made in.”

In August, Gena said she put herself through treatment after returning from Bob's memorial service. She said she had been clean since Jan. 25.

"It really hurts me that my dad never got to see me get my life together," she said.

By November, however, Gena was back in a three-week rehab program. She attributed the relapse to her depression, and said she "wasn’t managing it with medication like I should have been." In early May, she said she had stayed clean since completing the program.

"It’s still hard a lot of days," Gena said. "And it’s hard to stay away from the people that kind of want to push it on you.”

Lisa Paillet, who asked that her first name be changed for this story, graduated in 1991 from then-Southwest Missouri State University with a degree in theater — which she said her father "paid for, I’m pretty sure, with drug money."

She returned to California, where she grew up, and gradually drifted away from theater-related work. When her father, then on probation in Texas, found a job that made machining equipment, he paid for her to go to school to get a machinist's certification. She was hired by a company she described as being in the military aerospace research sector, which paid for her to get a bachelor's degree in engineering.

“That’s when our conversations about science really took off, and we would talk for long periods of time,” she said of her father.

Regarding her sister, she said Gena's "world is very, very different from mine.”

“He and Gena had a very, very different relationship than he and I had ... I think he treated her far more like a child than he ever treated me," Lisa said. "And because he didn’t really raise me, he didn’t have rules for me … I think even though I went down his road a little bit when I was very young, I think my upbringing with my mother definitely was not the same.”

Lisa said her father's decision to take his own life wasn't entirely unexpected. Suicide was something he mentioned casually over the years, she said.

"He knew he was going to commit suicide if he ever got too sick, and I knew it a long time ago," Lisa said.

Bob Paillet's parents died in the 1980s. They are buried in a cemetery in Exeter, Missouri, where they lived and where Bob spent his high school years.

Lisa said her father, who became obsessed with gold mining in the later years of his life, requested his ashes be scattered at his gold claim. However, she's has been unable to find it. When Lisa called Colorado, she was told he didn't have a claim in the state.

Though Paillet appears to have avoided run-ins with the law late in life, the process he pioneered continued to occupy authorities.

Some states responded to the rise in small-scale meth labs by requiring prescriptions for purchase of products containing pseudoephedrine.

Missouri didn't, but over time dozens of communities within the state instituted their own prescription laws. City leaders in Springfield debated doing the same in 2013, but the effort wasn't without controversy.

That fall, Councilwoman Cindy Rushefsky — a former prosecutor who supported the measure — asked Springfield's police chief to provide monthly reports detailing meth lab activity in the city. She pitched it as a way for council to stay informed on the issue. Councilman Doug Burlison, a libertarian who opposed the prescription requirement, described it as "an attempt to educate us to have different opinions."

Then a funny thing happened. The police chief's monthly reports consistently described fewer and fewer meth labs being found in the city. In July 2014, the prescription bill was tabled indefinitely.

The situation wasn't unique to Springfield. The number of small meth labs seized in the United States has declined in recent years, from about 15,000 in 2010 to about 4,500 in 2016.

It's not that the drug has lost its presence in the United States. Last year, when state and local law enforcement agencies were asked to name the greatest drug threat in their area, heroin received the most votes. The agencies that selected it, however, were strongly concentrated in the Great Lakes and northeast regions of the United States. In the western part of the country, more agencies chose meth.

Most of that meth is produced in Mexico and smuggled across the border.

In a 2016 report, the DEA attributed the decline in domestic labs to the wide availability of high-purity, high-potency meth from Mexico, as well as the passage of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, a federal law enacted in 2006 which placed restrictions on the meth precursors ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine.

Nick Console, who spent about a decade as the top DEA official in Springfield, said Paillet's Nazi method may have prompted the cartels to become more involved with production of meth.

"Why? Because you had a huge addiction problem here in the United States to methamphetamine," he said. "Supply and demand.”

Console retired to a farm in Ash Grove. John Cornille, the DEA agent most involved with investigating Paillet, still works for the agency.

Mike Poplawski — who was taught the Nazi method by Paillet himself — has served his prison sentence. He understands how the statute of limitations works, double jeopardy and all that.

Ask him about the early days of Nazi dope, however, and he chooses his words carefully. He's convinced that saying certain things could get the DEA interested in him again. He says he's been at the same job for 15 years, together with his wife for 25 years.

"I’ve got grandkids that love me, step-kids that love me, extended family that love me," he said. "You look from the other side — the law enforcement side — I’m a bad man.”

In an interview in his Springfield home, Poplawski, 59, said the people he considers meth's Nazi dope generation are "all in jail or dead," and that those currently involved with the drug aren't self-starters. He voiced frustration at seeing "bangers shooting each other, shooting up neighborhoods, doing dope and falling asleep in their cars with the kids in the cars and s---- like that."

"I want to go around with a .22 starter pistol and start capping people," he said. "I can still find the houses. They’re not the same houses. But a speeder can always recognize another speeder."

Asked about his own actions, Poplawski said "if I knew then what I knew now, I would’ve done things different."

"I like to think that I had the ability to make a change," he said.

At the same time, he said, "there's always going to be an addiction."

"The hole’s always there," Poplawski said. "And once it got filled by meth, we had the meth crisis ... Now you’ve got [a] prescription drug crisis and you’ve got [a] heroin crisis hard. Meth’s bad. I don’t think heroin’s an improvement."

Reached at a federal prison in Texas, Gary Davis — the only other individual indicted alongside Paillet still living — declined to be interviewed without compensation. In a brief email, he did include one comment.

"Meth is a scourge on society," Davis wrote. "I wish I would have never messed with it."

Paillet expressed similar sentiments years before his death.

"I wish I never started it," he told a News-Leader reporter in 1998. "I would never do it again."

"I caused a lot of trouble with a lot of people."

How we reported this story

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.

The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.

The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.