Criminal Minds (5 page)

His last successful bomb exploded on December 2, 1956, in the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn during a screening of
War and Peace
. Stephen P. Kennedy, New York’s police commissioner, declared the “greatest manhunt in the history of the police department” to bring the Mad Bomber to justice.

For all those years and all those bombs, law enforcement had made little real progress. Because F.P. referred so often to Con Ed in his messages, the police believed that he was a disgruntled employee, past or present. There were many of those, however, and the employee records weren’t always so orderly. The bombs themselves carried few helpful clues. Finally, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney of New York’s crime lab asked a friend in the Missing Persons Bureau for help.

That friend knew a criminal psychologist, Dr. James Brussel, who had done counterespionage work for the FBI and the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division during the Korean War. Criminal profiling was in its infancy; noted profiler John Douglas has written that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s legendary director, considered it voodoo and wouldn’t allow anything like the Behavioral Sciences Unit (later to become the Behavioral Analysis Unit) to exist under his regime.

But Dr. Brussel seemed to know his stuff. After reviewing the case file, he told Finney that the Mad Bomber was a male and a textbook paranoiac. Because paranoia peaks around age thirty-five, and the Mad Bomber had first been heard from in 1940, he was probably now in his fifties. Based on his neatly if oddly written notes, he was an orderly man with an exemplary work history. He had some education and was foreign-born. He was probably a former employee who believed that the company and the general public had done him harm. Most of his notes were written in block capital letters, but his W’s were oddly rounded, suggesting a pair of breasts. That, his slitting the undersides of theater seats with a knife (which suggested sexual penetration), and the phallic shape of his pipe bombs led Brussel to believe F.P. suffered from an unresolved Oedipal complex. He probably had lost his mother when he was young, was unmarried, and lived with a female relative.

When the cops thought Brussel was done, they gathered their materials and prepared to leave. But Brussel, a man with more than a touch of the theatrical about him, wasn’t finished. “One more thing,” he said. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.” He paused, for dramatic effect. “And it will be buttoned,” Brussel finished.

He suggested to the detectives that they publicize the profile and make the hunt for the bomber front-page news. With some reluctance, they did so. The expected onslaught of cranks and bad tips followed.

In response, the Mad Bomber sent more letters. Somehow he got his hands on Brussel’s unlisted phone number and called him. “This is F.P. speaking,” he said. “Keep out of this or you’ll be sorry.”

The
New York Journal American
published an open letter to the Mad Bomber, pleading with him to give up. He responded by mail, and the paper printed his response. In further correspondence, he went into more detail about his gripe against Con Ed.

Finally, a Con Ed employee named Alice Kelly found a file from a smaller company that had merged into the giant utility company. In 1931, an employee named George Metesky had inhaled gushing gas, which he blamed for the tuberculosis he later developed. He hadn’t been able to prove his claim, and the company had refused to compensate him.

Metesky fit the profile, and the specifics of his case matched what F.P. had written to the
Journal American
. Kelly took the file to her superiors, who referred it to the police. On January 21, 1957, the police knocked on the door of Metesky’s residence in Waterbury, Connecticut, where the fifty-four-year-old man lived with two older sisters. After he had been asked a few questions, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.”

They did indeed, and he admitted it right away. They asked what F.P. stood for, and he told them it meant Fair Play. Metesky was in his pajamas and robe when the police came to the door at almost midnight, so he asked if he could get dressed before they took him in. They allowed him that, and he went upstairs. When he came back down, his hair was combed and he was wearing a double-breasted jacket—buttoned.

Metesky was ruled insane in April 1957 and sentenced to New York’s Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a mentally ill defendant could not be committed to a state hospital within the correctional system unless a jury had found him dangerous. Since Metesky had been committed without a jury trial, he was transferred in September 1973 to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, a state hospital outside the correctional system. Here the doctors determined that Metesky was harmless, and because he had already served two-thirds of the twenty-five-year maximum sentence that he would have received at a trial, he was released in December 1973 on the condition that he make regular visits to a mental hygiene clinic near his home. He returned home to Waterbury, where he died in 1994.

Brussel’s profile wasn’t right in every respect. He put the bomber in White Plains, not Waterbury. He suggested that the man would have a facial scar and work nights. Metesky had no scar and didn’t work at all. Brussel thought the target had been born and educated in Germany, but Metesky was a Slav. Brussel predicted that the bomber had heart disease, but Metesky had tuberculosis. Had it not been for Alice Kelly’s careful detective work, Metesky might never have been found. Kelly turned down the twenty-six-thousand-dollar reward she was offered for the Mad Bomber’s capture, saying she had just been doing her job.

But Brussel’s story was what people remembered, particularly the bit about the buttoned double-breasted jacket. He became the first famous criminal profiler, and everyone who has come along since owes something to his work in helping to catch the Mad Bomber.

 

 

JASON GIDEON
mentions Brussel’s profile of Metesky when discussing the difficulties of profiling in the episode “A Real Rain” (117). In this episode, the unknown subject of the investigation (the “unsub,” in FBI parlance) is a serial vigilante, killing people who have been acquitted of crimes but whom he believes to be guilty. Gideon worries that the case may become reminiscent of another vigilante folk hero, Bernhard Hugo Goetz, who in 1984 became famous for shooting four young black men on a New York City subway because he believed they were going to rob him.

Crime was a given in New York City in the early 1980s; the reported crime rate there was 70 percent higher than in the rest of the country. An average of thirty-eight crimes took place on New York subways every day.

In January 1981, three young black men had attacked Goetz at the Canal Street subway station. They smashed him into a plate-glass window and tore the cartilage in his knee. Only one of the three men was apprehended, and he spent three hours at police headquarters, charged only with criminal mischief for tearing Goetz’s jacket. Goetz, clearly the victim, was at headquarters for six hours. He was almost as outraged by the aftermath as by the attack itself.

Later that year, Goetz went to Florida and bought a .38 revolver, since he couldn’t get a pistol permit in New York.

The Saturday before Christmas in 1984, Goetz stepped onto a largely empty subway car. On board were four black youths, headed into Manhattan to steal money from video arcade machines. Two of them rose, blocking the view of Goetz from other passengers. Nineteen-year-old Troy Canty approached Goetz and demanded five dollars. Goetz stood up, unzipped his jacket, and asked Canty to repeat what he had said. Canty did. One of the other men made a gesture that Goetz interpreted to mean that he had a weapon. Goetz said that he mentally constructed his field of fire, drew his .38, and fired five times. One shot missed, but the other four found their marks, each hitting one of the young men. None died, but nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey’s spinal cord was severed, causing brain damage and paralyzing him from the waist down.

When a conductor entered the car, Goetz explained that the young men had tried to rob him. The train stopped before the next station, and Goetz slipped away into the darkened tunnel. Hurrying home, he packed a bag and hit the road for New England, where he dumped his clothes and disassembled his .38, tossing the pieces into the woods.

Goetz was an instant celebrity. Citizens bemoaned his lack of accuracy, not his vigilante approach. He traded on his notoriety, giving dozens of interviews, speaking about crime, and attending the funerals of crime victims. His supporters were all in favor of his actions, whereas his detractors called him a racist and accused him of skulking about the subway armed and looking for an excuse to shoot somebody, just to take revenge on any black youths for the wrong that had been done to him in 1981.

Goetz turned himself in to the police in New Hampshire and stayed at the police station until New York’s finest came to pick him up. Back home, he was arraigned for attempted murder and illegal possession of a firearm, but a grand jury decided that his use of force had been justified, and the only charge he faced was for the unlicensed handgun. A second grand jury reversed that decision, and he stood trial. He admitted to the shootings but claimed self-defense. The jury acquitted Goetz of attempted murder and found him guilty of carrying a loaded, unlicensed weapon. He served eight months in jail. In a civil trial, a jury awarded Cabey forty-three million dollars, but Goetz has denied paying any of it.

If the idea that Goetz went “looking for victims” is valid, he would be considered a mission-based offender, someone who meant to rid New York of at least a handful of muggers. He’s not a serial offender, though, or a spree offender, who takes his weapon and commits one crime after another until he’s caught or killed. Someone who shoots multiple victims in a single event is called a mass offender and a vigilante, a breed that is scarce when the citizens of a society feel protected by institutional law enforcement but that is more common when they’re afraid.

Although Bernhard Goetz left New York after the furor died down, he returned to the city and ran for mayor in 2001. He lost.

 

 

YET ANOTHER
reference in the episode “A Real Rain” (117) is to the Zodiac Killer, who Spencer Reid suggests is similar to the unsub due to constant changes in the type of victim. One of the great unsolved serial-killer mysteries, Zodiac is also brought up in “Unfinished Business” (115) and in “Normal” (411).

Zodiac’s first confirmed attack was on December 20, 1968, at Herman Lake in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, California. Two teenagers, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, were parked in a remote spot, no doubt steaming up the windows of Faraday’s station wagon. Witnesses saw them there at 11 p.m. The next time anyone saw them, Betty Lou was dead, several feet from the car, with five bullet holes in her back. David died en route to the hospital.

Shortly after midnight on July 5, 1969, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau sat in Ferrin’s car at a golf course a few miles from Herman Lake. A man drove up, got out of his car, and opened fire on the young lovers. Darlene died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but Michael survived and gave a description of their assailant.

At 12:40 a.m., the Vallejo Police Department received a stunning phone call from a pay phone. A male voice said, “I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a nine-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Good-bye.”

On July 31, three Bay Area newspapers each received part of a cryptogram allegedly sent by Zodiac, with a note warning of dramatic consequences if the newspapers did not print their respective parts. Proving once again that spelling is not a skill highly regarded by serial killers, Zodiac wrote, “I want you to print this cipher on your frunt page by Fry Afternoon Aug 1-69, If you do not do this I will go on a kill rampage Fry night that will last the whole week end. I will cruse around and pick off all stray people or coupples that are alone then move on to kill some more untill I have killed over a dozen people.”