The Killer Book of Cold Cases (5 page)
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The Mad Bomber seemed to have Con Edison on his mind constantly because he sent the next bomb through the mail to the company in White Plains, New York. Again, this was a dud but that did not reassure anyone about the Mad Bomber.
In a letter dated October 22, the bomber pointed cops toward the popular Paramount Theatre in Manhattan. No bomb was there, but police found a note that said:
Bombs will continue until the Consolidated Edison Company is brought to justice for their dastardly acts against me. I have exhausted all other means. I intend with bombs to cause others to cry out for justice for me.
On November 28, a coin-operated locker at the IRT 14th Street subway station was bombed, again without injury. Near the end of the year, the
Herald Tribune
received another letter.
Have you noticed the bombs in your city—if you are worried, I am sorry—and also if anyone is injured. But it cannot be helped—for justice will be served. I am not well, and for this I will make the Con Edison sorry—Yes, they will regret their dastardly deeds—I will bring them before the bar of justice—public opinion will condemn them—for beware, I will place more units under theater seats in the near future. F.P.
Several more bombs went off throughout the city in 1952 through 1954, injuring at least four people. Then, around Christmastime 1954, a bomb was planted in the cushion of a seat in Radio City Music Hall, where a capacity crowd of 6,200 people were watching the classic movie
White Christmas
with Bing Crosby.
The bomb went off, injuring four people. The heavy drapes muffled most of the sound, and the explosion was only heard by those in the immediate vicinity. Almost unbelievably, the show was allowed to go on, and only upon its completion were 150 seats taped off and a search for evidence begun. Good thing a second bomb hadn’t been planted someplace in the theater!
Through 1955 and 1956 the bombs continued, some injuring people, some duds, but residents’ terror continued to escalate. Indeed, because so many people were at risk and because the bomber did not confine his bombing to one area, fear during the Mad Bomber’s reign was said to be worse than the terror sown by David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, in the 1970s. With the Mad Bomber, everyone knew that eventually someone was going to get killed.
I’ve told this story in some of my other books, but it’s worth retelling here.
In the 1970s I was an aspiring TV writer, and one day the story editor of
Hawaii Five-O
, Ken Pettus, invited me to visit him in California. Bizarrely, though I’m an ex-paratrooper, I had become a little afraid of flying, so I took the train to Los Angeles from my home on Long Island.
I spent only a couple of hours with Ken, but I asked him if he would be interested in any story I could make up involving a volcano, and he said yes.
On the train back across the country, I came up with the story that would eventually run in 1975 as an episode called “A Hawaiian Nightmare.” It involved a volcanologist—an expert on volcanoes—threatening to make a volcano erupt unless he was paid a certain sum of money.
I didn’t know how to make a volcano erupt, so I consulted a volcanologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He told me the scheming character would have to blow a hole in the side of the volcano so the lava could flow out. That, in effect, would be just like an eruption. The hole would have to be a big one, so I wondered what kind of explosive could be used. It would have to be very powerful.
“I would suggest ammonium-nitrate fertilizer as the core material,” a chemist at DuPont told me.
“Is that powerful enough?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way,” the chemist said. “There was a ship docked in Texas City, Texas, in the ’40s whose hold was filled with ammonium nitrate. It went off, and they found the anchor two miles away.”
Indeed, he gave me the complete, simple formula (not revealed here or when the episode ran). The next time I heard about ammonium nitrate was in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh used it as the explosive to take down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I can just imagine trying to pick the brain of that DuPont chemist today. It wouldn’t happen.
A single event changed the way the police focused on the Mad Bomber. A December 2, 1956, bombing at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn left six of the theater’s 1,500 occupants injured, one seriously, and drew tremendous news coverage and editorial attention. The next day, New York City Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy ordered what he called “the greatest manhunt in the history of the police department.”
Of course, police already had a theory about the Mad Bomber’s identity. They thought they were looking for a former Con Edison employee with a grudge against the company and pointed the investigation in that direction. As a result, the cops reviewed Con Ed employment records, but that wasn’t the only thing they did. Detectives checked lawsuit records, mental-hospital admissions, and vocational schools where bomb parts might be made. Citizens turned in neighbors who behaved oddly and coworkers who seemed to know too much about bombs. All of these suspicions had to be checked. A new group, the Bomb Investigation Unit, was organized to focus solely on Mad Bomber leads. The police were desperate to catch him.
Police had developed a sort of profile of the Mad Bomber by April 1956. The department issued a multi-state alert for a person described as a skilled mechanic with access to a drill press or lathe (for its ability to thread pipe) who posted mail from White Plains, was over forty, and had a deep-seated hatred for the Consolidated Edison Company. Police distributed samples of the bomber’s distinctive printing and instructed anyone who recognized it to contact them. Police also reviewed drivers’ license applications in White Plains and found nearly 500 possible matches to the bomber’s printing; the names were forwarded to the NYPD for investigation.
Despite the active man hunt, the Mad Bomber kept bombing. On December 29, 1956, several weeks after the Paramount Theater episode in Brooklyn, he placed a bomb in the Empire State Building. Cops tried to track him down using all available forensics, but they were unsuccessful. Then John Cronin, an NYPD police captain working the case, contacted a friend of his, James Brussel, MD, a criminologist, psychiatrist, and assistant commissioner of the New York State Commission for Mental Hygiene. Captain Cronin asked Brussel to meet with Inspector Howard E. Finney, head of the NYPD’s crime laboratory.
Brussel was an early practitioner of profiling, in which the investigator studies the behavioral actions of the perp and then creates a portrait of him or her that includes factors such as age, race, sexuality, educational level, and the like. Years later, the technique would prove invaluable to the FBI, and some of the agency’s profiles would prove to be remarkably accurate.
On one of the visits I made to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, I first learned about the process of profiling, which can be described as a way of finding out who might have committed a particular crime, say murder, by closely examining elements and surrounding elements of the crime scene, and then drawing a profile of the killer based on the type of perp who usually commits that type of crime.
For example, one of the most obvious profiles often can be drawn for the murderer of a homosexual male. These murders typically involve what cops call “overkill,” and the murder weapon usually is a knife. In an overkill, the victim may have been stabbed one hundred times or more when just a few blows would have been fatal. Those extra blows were driven by rage in a relationship gone bad. Hence, the FBI and police will start by looking for a gay male.
Although some people argue that it is a flawed art or science, profiling has been regularly used by FBI investigative stars like John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and Roy Hazelwood. And it has paid off. Indeed, why would the FBI continue to use profiling if it didn’t work? Keep reading to learn more about several of today’s famous profilers.
Psychologist Robert Keppel’s real-life experience with one of the major serial killers of the twentieth century is straight out of the pages of fiction. Like the FBI agent in Thomas Harris’s
The Red Dragon
who enlists the help of the brilliant serial killer Hannibal Lecter to track down serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, Keppel visited Ted Bundy on Death Row in Starke, Florida, and got innumerable insights on how to track down the Green River Killer.
No discussion of criminal profilers would be complete without detailing the innovative work of John Douglas, who might be considered a superstar among superstars. This former FBI agent developed a variety of sophisticated profiling techniques and had many successes in profiling. Probably his greatest success came from accurately profiling Wayne Williams, the serial killer responsible for murdering more than thirty young African Americans in the case that became known as the Atlanta Child Murders. John Douglas’s profile led to the arrest of Wayne Williams. Williams maintained his innocence, but once he went to jail for the crimes, the murders in the area stopped.
There is some debate, but ex-FBI agent Robert Ressler, one of the founding fathers in 1972 of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, is said to have invented the term “serial” murderer or killer to refer to someone who murders at least three people in a row, with a cooling-off period in between.
Ressler interviewed more than thirty serial killers including Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Edmund Kemper. Ressler had many memorable moments, but none more memorable then when he was interviewing the giant (6'10", 250 pounds) Kemper in a small interrogation room. Kemper suddenly announced that he could pounce on Ressler and kill him before the guards standing outside the door could stop him. He didn’t, of course, but Ressler learned something about being alone with a killer.
I met Roy Hazelwood in the 1980s at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. He was a quiet, intense man who smoked cigarillos and had a wry sense of humor. But after listening to the kind of things he investigated, I wondered how he could sleep at night.
Hazelwood’s specialty was investigating major sex-based crimes, such as those committed by serial rapists and murderers. One of his most notable investigations was the case of Robert Hansen in Alaska who would capture his victims, torture them, kill them, and then have sex with them up to thirty-two days after their deaths.
With Finney and two detectives, Brussel examined the crime-scene photos and letters and discussed the bomber’s metal-working and electrical skills. Based on that, he developed what he called a “portrait,” or profile, of the bomber. Brussel theorized that the bomber’s motivations stemmed from the belief that he had been wronged by Con Edison. That led Brussel to conclude that the bomber suffered from paranoia, a condition he described as “a chronic disorder of insidious development, characterized by persistent, unalterable, systematized, and logically constructed delusions.” Based on the evidence and his own experience in dealing with psychotic criminals, Brussel put forth a number of theories. As it turned out, his portrait would turn out to be remarkably close to that of the actual Mad Bomber.
Brussel theorized that the Mad Bomber was a man, as most bombers usually are. Based on his knowledge of hospitalized mental patients, Brussel postulated that the Mad Bomber was well proportioned, of average build, and a good worker. Because paranoia is a disease that takes a while to develop, the bomber was likely to be in his forties or fifties.
In addition, Brussel suspected that the bomber was foreign born—and likely a Slav because bombs were favored by criminals in middle Europe. Brussels also suspected that the bomber’s notes were written by someone whose native language was not English, adding to his suspicion that the bomber was foreign.
Brussel also profiled the bomber as being a loner who had no friends. Unmarried, he had little interest in women, was possibly a virgin, and perhaps was living with an older female relative. They likely lived in Connecticut because the state had high concentrations of Slavs and because many of the bomber’s letters were posted in Westchester County, New York, the midway point between Connecticut and New York City. Brussel also predicted that when the bomber was caught, he would be wearing a buttoned, double-breasted suit. That detail turned out to be astonishingly correct.
As the police investigated, they kept what they had discovered close to the vest, but Brussel had an idea about how to flush out the perp. Brussel convinced the police to heavily publicize the profile they had developed, predicting that any wrong assumption made in it would prod the bomber to respond. Under the headline “16-Year Search for a Madman,” the
New York Times
version of the profile summarized its major components.
“Single man, between 40 and 50 years old, introvert. Unsocial but not antisocial. Skilled mechanic. Cunning. Neat with tools. Egotistical about mechanical skill. Contemptuous of other people. Resentful of criticism of his work but probably conceals resentment. Moral. Honest. Not interested in women. High school graduate. Expert in civil or military ordnance. Religious. Might flare up violently at work when criticized. Possible motive: discharge or reprimand. Feels superior to critics. Resentment keeps growing. Present or former Consolidated Edison worker. Probably case of progressive paranoia.”
The profile came out on Christmas Day 1956, and no one could have predicted the reaction it would receive. Hoaxes and false confessions poured in, and by three days after Christmas, the cops had received fifty false warnings about bombs.
