The Mad Bomber of New York (15 page)

After years of crime lab analysis, and the application of common sense, the police themselves had developed several working assumptions about the Bomber. Based upon the phrasing of his writings and the use of certain distinctive and characteristic lettering, they theorized that he was of German extraction and most likely middle-aged. They knew, by examination of bomb fragments and the unexploded devices, that he possessed some mechanical expertise, and the flood of threatening letters against Con Ed led them to the obvious conclusion that the Bomber had, in some way, been connected to the power conglomerate. Abstract generalities, however, did not equate with solid evidence. The task of generating reliable information that would lead to the identity of the Bomber still lay before the department.

The revitalized police investigation mandated by Commissioner Kennedy was spearheaded by a newly formed Bomb Investigation Unit that worked exclusively on the Mad Bomber case and reported directly to the chief of detectives. The so-called BIU acted in a liaison capacity alongside both the bomb squad and the crime laboratory, coordinating and developing the entire body of evidence. Initially organized with a staff of nine investigators, the ranks of the BIU would swell to nineteen, then to thirty-four, and ultimately to seventy-six members in the days following the commissioner's announcement.

BIU detectives canvassed the streets of New York in a coordinated web, checking and verifying any possible clues in the case. They visited jewelry stores and watch shops on a regular basis to determine whether any “regular” customer had been purchasing an inordinate number of cheap watches. They went to Army surplus stores and plumbing supply houses in an effort to trace the pipes and iron plugs regularly used by the Bomber. They checked sporting goods stores and hunting supply shops, hoping to jog the memory of an owner or a clerk as to any large purchase of bullets or other powder-based munitions. They checked and double-checked the personnel files of disgruntled or terminated Con Ed employees and sought court records for any lawsuits filed against the company. They painstakingly scoured the patient files of surrounding mental institutions where the Bomber might have sought treatment or suffered commitment, such as Bellevue, Brooklyn State, and Grasslands, and they reviewed thousands of records of discharged World War II servicemen.

Yet, for whatever information detectives had been able to generate in the department's most extensive manhunt, they had little in the way of solid, actionable evidence. In the days following the Paramount Theatre bombing, the department was forced to admit that its search for the Mad Bomber had drawn to an impasse. As one New York newspaper reported, the police had “reached the end of their investigative rope.”

IX
A CITY IN TURMOIL

A
S IT BECAME APPARENT THAT THE
N
EW
Y
ORK POLICE HAD NO REAL
insight into the identity of the Mad Bomber, the public began to withdraw into a cocoon of fear. “I didn't see any reason why he shouldn't put a [bomb] under my bed!” recalled one New Yorker decades later, summing up the fears of children throughout the city.

In the winter of 1956, neighbors began casting a suspicious eye upon neighbors, and the bustling streets of New York City and beyond seemed to drone with an uncharacteristic air of apprehension. Train stations, bus terminals, and movie theaters, all favorite targets of the Bomber, reported dramatic reductions in patronage, and a palpable drop in local retail activity marked an overall sense that people had begun to avoid the city. “A whole generation of New Yorkers never felt entirely comfortable in public places,” wrote Jamie James for
Rolling Stone
in his 1979 retrospective on the Mad Bomber
.
“You thought twice before you used a phone booth or went to the movies. You heard lots of Mad Bomber jokes—you'd laugh, but they weren't really funny,” a local resident recalled. “He had the whole city in panic,” stated another.

It was an era when Americans lived under the threat of nuclear conflict. Evening news reports warning of Soviet aggression and targeted warheads fueled a Cold War cynicism that became part of the undercurrent of daily life. The ominous markings of carefully situated fallout shelters and the presentation of coordinated training programs on survival techniques in the event of nuclear attack presented a constant reminder to adults and children alike that annihilation was only a mushroom cloud away. Americans had received training and preparation for a nuclear conflagration that seemed palpable but, at least, perhaps, politically avoidable. The citizens of New York, however, were demonstrably unprepared for the anxiety of an ongoing and daily war of munitions that existed in reality within the confines of their own retail markets, theaters, and transportation systems. “It is one thing to live under a cloud of fear . . . but it is another thing altogether when lightening strikes again and again,” wrote the
New York Times,
reflecting on “Terror in the Age of Eisenhower
.
” The siege of an unknown assailant bore upon the beleaguered city like a pungent curse.

It wasn't long before the wave of panic would develop into a seething anger. Newspapers began to question the competence of the police department, and the public at large soon followed. With all the available evidence, such as intact bombs, writing samples, and known methods of operation, why, asked New Yorkers, was the department at such a loss for clues in the Bomber investigation? The political pressures on Commissioner Kennedy grew by the day, and he, in turn, began commuting those pressures to his department chiefs. The New York police seemed to shudder beneath the weight of a fermenting urgency.

Amid this agitated turmoil, police brass bonded together and attempted to fuse the expertise of the varying districts and bureaus within the department. In a concentrated effort to share information and develop innovative and imaginative methods to corner the Bomber, active communication became the cornerstone of the investigation. Implementing this posture of interaction, the chief of the department's missing-persons bureau, a career officer named John J. Cronin, in an offhand conversation with Captain Howard Finney of the crime laboratory, relayed a bold and innovative idea.

The two had an ongoing course of dealing involving the technical analysis of evidence in missing-person cases, typically teenage runaways, and had developed a fairly open and friendly relationship through the years. Aware, of course, that the commissioner had been pressing Finney for quicker and more constructive results on the technical end of the Bomber investigation, Cronin happened to mention a psychiatrist friend with whom he had appeared at several police chief conventions, and whom he knew to have a broad and working interest in the behavior of criminal offenders. Cronin posited that perhaps this psychiatrist could be of use to the investigation. The highly educated and broadminded Finney listened intently to Cronin's description of the man, and his imagination began to swirl. Could the field of psychiatry actually assist in a criminal case? If a physical description of the Bomber was unavailable, could a trained individual develop a psychological description—a profile of sorts? The pressures of the investigation had clearly worn upon the fatigued director, and he was eager to explore any possible methods, regardless of novelty, in the case. Perhaps, he surmised, this was just the innovative thinking that the investigation needed.

Finney was an accomplished technical presence on the New York City Police Department. His tough and understated demeanor betrayed no hint of the three college degrees that he held—including a master's in forensic psychiatry. “He has been described as poker-faced,” wrote one newspaper. “[B]ut when he gets angry . . . he looks like he's going to explode right out of his well-tailored business suit.” As commanding officer of the police laboratory, Finney gained a reputation as a “Book of Rules,” or one whose expertise kept him buried in the numinous confines of the crime lab offices. A short and stocky man with thinning gray hair, Finney was a well-respected scientist through every rank of the department and into the upper echelons of New York law enforcement. His 1956 contribution to the
Manual for Prosecuting Attorneys
, titled “Forensic Evidence and Scientific Police Methods,” would provide technical guidance on crime lab techniques to New York district attorneys for years to come. In later years, his hardnosed deportment and celebrated credentials would land him in the commissioner's seat of the Buffalo Police Department, but in December 1956 Finney would find himself consumed by the beleaguered search for the Mad Bomber.

Dr. James Brussel eyed the ever growing stack of files and reports that cluttered his high-rise Manhattan office at the State Department of Mental Hygiene. Through 1956, the department had overseen an institutional population of approximately 120,000 patients, and it was witnessing an annual increase of nearly 3,000 per year. Though the arcane methodology of custodial care had given way to the more enlightened approach of prevention, it seemed that Brussel's patient caseload and administrative functions had risen steadily through the years, taking its toll on his private practice and family life. He was really looking forward to a holiday vacation.

When his friend Captain Cronin called to initiate a meeting with the director of the New York City Crime Laboratory to discuss the Mad Bomber case, Brussel wavered. Not only had his already jam-packed schedule of lectures, appointments, and paperwork left him with little time for extraneous endeavors, he had failed to see what assistance he could provide to the case. “I had real people to deal with, not ghosts,” Brussel would later write.

Up to that point in time, psychiatry and crime fighting had joined only in theoretical studies and fictionalized detective novels. For years, Sherlock Holmes had successfully postulated logical and dispassionate deductions in apprehending his man, but in practice the two disciplines were, for the most part, separate endeavors having little to do with one another. Through the early 1950s, the pervasive attitude among law enforcement toward the untested realm of psychiatry was one of disdain and mistrust. Tracking criminals, they held, was the job of the police— and psychiatrists generally agreed.

“I don't know what you expect me to do,” Brussel said to his friend. “If experts haven't cracked this case in more than ten years of trying, what could I hope to contribute?”

“Maybe you'll come up with something. Inspector Finney needs a break. The Commissioner is pressing him for results . . . Come on. Give it a whirl, doctor. Sometimes the difference between failure and success is a new thought.”

Brussel paused for a moment and then hesitatingly agreed to meet with Finney. Though he didn't know it at the time, his decision would be remembered as a pioneering step on the road to a new discipline of law enforcement.

X
PROFILE OF A BOMBER

D
R.
J
AMES
B
RUSSEL WOULD LATER ADMIT THAT HIS PROFESSIONAL CURI-
osity had been aroused by the Mad Bomber. He had followed the intense media coverage of the case and, like all New Yorkers, wondered what kind of person would engage in such a fiendish and perilous pattern of conduct for so many years. Privately, Brussel had constructed several speculative notions about the nature of the perpetrator and the makeup of his character, but such thoughts were general and fleeting, without purpose or substance. His professional opinion had never been formally or officially requested in connection with an ongoing police investigation—indeed, no psychiatrist's opinion had ever been so requested. When Brussel greeted Captain Finney and two associate detectives in the Manhattan office of the Department of Hygiene on that brisk December day in 1956, they were navigating uncharted ground.

Though the process of attributing probable physical, personality, and character traits to a criminal offender based upon an analysis of crime scene evidence and behaviors—what would later become known as criminal profiling—had never been specifically used in the United States by a police force to assist in the identification of a criminal suspect, the technique is deeply rooted in history, lore, and literature. Homer's eighth century
BC
classic
The Iliad
spoke of the ugly and deformed features of a character as being indicative of criminal tendencies, and Plato, in
Hippias Major,
suggested a relationship between physical ugliness and psychological comportment. During the Inquisition, an early form of profiling was embodied in the Latin publication
The Malleus Maleficarum
, or
The Witches' Hammer
, which was, in essence, a handbook for the identification and prosecution of witches. Published in 1486 and sanctioned by the Catholic Church, the document asserted divine authority to dispose of heretics and heathens, and set forth a series of general characteristics such as birthmarks, solitary lifestyle, and pet ownership as evidentiary badges of witchcraft and devil worship.