HOLLIS BEND, Wis. — After 14 months of independent investigation, local man Randall Kemper completed his research Saturday into the 2019 resurfacing of County Road J and is reportedly furious that it concluded the road was resurfaced by the county.
“I went in with an open mind, and I came out with this,” said Kemper, 47, holding a 600-page binder whose final page reads, in his handwriting, “Highway Department. Like the sign said.” “Fourteen months. I want them back.”
Kemper’s research drew on 212 online forum posts, 41 videos, a call to the county clerk’s office that he hung up on before it was answered, and what he described as “pattern recognition.” He began the project in August 2025 after noticing that the road “felt different,” and his initial hypothesis named nine possible parties behind the resurfacing, including “a consortium,” “the asphalt people,” and “them.” Each was eliminated in turn, and the final chapter of the binder, titled “The Truth,” consists of a photograph of the orange sign that stood at the edge of the road for the duration of the project, which reads “Road Work Ahead: Hollis County Highway Department.”
Since completing the binder, Kemper has opened a second investigation into who funded the first, and determined that it was funded by him. “Follow the money and it goes right back to me,” Kemper said. “Which is exactly what they’d want me to find.” He has since filed a formal complaint with himself, reviewed it, and concluded that he was stonewalling. As of Monday, Kemper had stopped speaking to himself pending the outcome, and was communicating with himself only through a lawyer, whom he also is.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said research that confirms the official explanation should be considered incomplete.
“Real research doesn’t end until you find what you were looking for,” Brickhouse said by phone from a youth hockey rink. “If the answer is the first thing they told you, you haven’t dug deep enough. You have to keep going until it’s something else. It’s just common sense.”
Kemper’s sister-in-law, who asked not to be named, citing Thanksgiving, said she had told Kemper that the county resurfaced the road “in about four seconds, in 2025, at a cookout.” Kemper said he remembered the conversation and that it was “a big part of why I had to look into it.”
Neighbors said Kemper had previously completed independent research into why the mail arrives at 2 p.m., concluding after nine months that it was “the mail,” and into a humming noise in his garage, which he traced over a winter to the refrigerator in his garage.
Kemper said he plans to appeal the findings to a higher authority, which he identified as a second binder.