The Killer Book of Cold Cases (6 page)

The day after the profile was published, the
New York Journal-American
published a letter, first edited by the police, urging the bomber to give himself up. The newspaper promised a “fair trial” and offered to publish his grievances. The Mad Bomber wrote back the next day, signing his letter “F.P.” He said that he would not give himself up. He also revealed that his days on earth, scarily, were numbered. Did he plan to go out in a blast of glory, taking others with him?

The
Journal-American
published another letter with police guidance on January 15, 1957, asking the bomber to provide more details about his grievances. The bomber wrote back: “I was injured on the job at Consolidated Edison plant—as a result I am adjudged—totally and permanently disabled.” He also stated that he had had to pay his own medical bills and that Consolidated Edison had blocked his workers’ compensation case.

The bomber said he had been injured on January 5, 1931. He said that no one came to his aid and other employees lied about his condition so he couldn’t get compensation. In setting up a dialogue with him, the police obviously had one goal: to gather as much information as possible.

Alice Kelly, a Con Edison clerk, was one of many people trying to find out who the Mad Bomber was. She had spent many hours going through compensation claims at Con Ed to see if any of the claimants seemed like the Mad Bomber. Then, on Friday, January 28, 1957, when she had gone through almost all of the claims, she came across a file containing handwritten complaints that read like those of the bomber, including the phraseology. Indeed, one of the terms used was “dastardly deeds.” The complainant, George Metesky, lived in Waterbury, Connecticut. He had been injured in a plant accident on September 5, 1931, and his letters complained bitterly about how he had been denied compensation.

Alice contacted her superiors and the NYPD, who contacted the Waterbury police and asked that they discreetly check out Metesky’s house at 17 Fourth Street. One thing led to another, and eventually when NYPD detectives knocked on Metesky’s door, they were greeted by a middleaged, pleasant Slavic man very much like the man Brussel had profiled. The man was unmarried and lived with two elderly sisters in the house.

Upon seeing the police officers, Metesky said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” The detectives asked what “F.P.” stood for, and he told them it meant Fair Play. Metesky was arrested, and the story exploded. Later, Metesky told the arresting officers that he had been “gassed” in the Con Edison accident, had contracted tuberculosis as a result, and had started planting bombs because he “got a bum deal.”

Going over a police list of thirty-two bomb locations, but never using the word “bomb,” he remembered the exact date where each “unit” had been placed and its size. He then added to the police list the size, date, and location of fifteen early bombs the police had not known about—all left at Con Edison locations and apparently never reported. When his Con Edison bombs did not gain public attention, he had started planting bombs in public places to gain publicity for what he termed the “injustices” done him.

He also confirmed the reason no bombs had been planted during the United States’ involvement in World War II: the former Marine had abstained because of his patriotism. In their search of his house, police found parts for a bomb that would have been larger than any of the others. Metesky explained that it was intended for the New York Coliseum.

In the end, Metesky went on trial in New York and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent to the Matteawan State Hospital on April 18, 1957, and though most people expected him to spend his life there, that didn’t happen. In 1973, he was declared well enough to be released from Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, a facility to which he had been transferred, and he lived the last twenty years of his life—he died at ninety—peacefully. He hoped to the last that his compensation case against Consolidated Edison would be heard, but it wasn’t.

The worst of what were to be
2,000
fires set by a California arsonist occurred on October 10, 1984, in Ole’s Home Center on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. It was the worst of the blazes because it took human life—and the baffling part was figuring out who had set it.

The fire was of an extremely dangerous type—and they do vary in levels of danger—but at first it was not perceived that way, so people who were being urged to leave the building did not all get out in time. Why didn’t they leave rapidly? Some didn’t realize the need to flee, while others, perhaps in reaction to the stressful situation, chose to bury their heads in the sand.

The fire was first spotted by Jim Obdam, an Ole’s clerk. He was walking toward the front of the store when he saw a tubular column of dark smoke. He immediately started to check the store for other people and found Carolyn Kraus working in the paint area. Jim asked if any more people were in her area, and she ran off to check.

In the hardware section, Obdam found a 50-year-old woman named Ada Deal who was pushing a shopping cart with a small child riding in it. He told her they had to leave the store immediately but contradicted himself by adding, “Don’t be alarmed.” Obdam ran away, but at one point he looked back to see the woman and child still there. “Take the child,” he said more urgently, “and let’s go.”

He ran forward and, at one point, looked toward the smoke, which had turned into “a wall of flame…bright orange and
raging
,” as Joseph Wambaugh described it in his book
Fire Lover
. Then the lights went out abruptly, and the store was plunged into darkness.

No one outside had an all-encompassing view of what was happening in the store, so some people—including Billy Deal, whose wife and grandson had entered the store only a half hour before—were unaware of the profound danger that those inside faced. Deal was alerted when an employee on a forklift went racing by yelling that there was a fire. Suddenly panicked, Billy called out for his wife, “Ada! Ada!” But she did not answer.

In the electrical department, an employee named Tony Colantuano spotted another employee and several customers headed toward the south fire door. He yelled at them to come with him, that the quickest way out was a door he knew of, and they turned and ran toward it. Later Colantuano would say that there was a wave of fire behind them, moving toward them. But the people who went through the door with him lived.

The store had turned into an inferno, and in the end, after the firemen got the blaze under control, four people were dead: Ada Deal and her grandson Matthew Troidl; Carolyn Kraus, who worked in the paint department; and a handsome young Hispanic man named Jimmy Cetina. He had left the store but went back in when he heard people banging on a metal fire door. It had automatically dropped as a safety measure to keep fire from spreading between different areas. The metal doors had been designed with the assumption that they would only be activated at night when no one was in the store.

While the fire was raging at Ole’s, Chief Murray, who was directing the operations of 125 firefighters, learned of a stupefying coincidence: another fire was ablaze at Von’s Market, which was on the same street as Ole’s and only a few minutes away.

At one point Murray glanced across the street and saw John Orr, a Glendale investigative firefighter, snapping pictures. Knowing Orr, who seemed to have a quick temper but had built a growing reputation as an excellent fire investigator, Murray alerted him about the fire at Von’s and asked if he would assist by conducting an investigation.

Perhaps—and there is no way to know if it would have helped—people would have lived and hundreds of fires would have been prevented if John Leonard Orr had been accepted as a police officer, which had been his dream. But who knows? A lot of innocent people might have been shot dead.