The Mad Bomber of New York (17 page)

The myriad typed and handwritten letters sent by the Bomber to concerns throughout the city had contained the common thread of a deep-seated anger directed at Con Edison for a series of injustices that had, according to the Bomber, resulted in his injury or disease. Through the years, his anger had broadened to include the press, libraries, theaters, bus and transit systems, and department stores, leaving Brussel with the obvious impression that the Bomber's feelings of persecution had extended to the world in general. “WHERE EVER A WIRE RUNS—GAS OR STEAM FLOWS—FROM OR TO THE CON. EDISON CO—IS NOW A BOMB TARGET . . . ,” the Bomber had written in his March 2, 1956, letter to the
Herald Tribune
, now scrupulously examined by Brussel
.
The threats had continued for more than fifteen years, and the Bomber had ominously promised that “MY LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THIS TASK.” The diagnosis was unmistakable: According to Brussel, the Mad Bomber suffered from a textbook case of paranoia.

The two detectives stifled cynical grins, but Finney leaned forward with interest as Brussel provided his definition of the condition: “a chronic disorder of insidious development, characterized by persistent, unalterable, systematized, logically constructed delusions.” Over time, he explained, the disorder typically broadens and grows worse and can often last a lifetime. “These are the people who eventually go on to become God,” he continued. “They feel they are omnipotent.” “The paranoiac is the world's champion grudge-holder,” wrote Brussel in his memoir,

Once he gets the idea that somebody has wronged him or is out to hurt him, the idea stays in his mind . . . Nothing you can say will make the paranoiac change his mind . . . He can marshal all kinds of compelling evidence to support his central premise. His delusion is rooted in reality in such a way that it baffles efforts to dispel it. He'll walk down a street with you and say, ‘See I told you I'm being followed—why there's a man right behind us now,
following me!
' And you look back, and sure enough there's a man behind you . . . You figure the man just happens to be going your way. The paranoiac is convinced the man has some sinister purpose. The paranoiac is pathologically self-centered—in psychiatry we say ‘narcissistic.' His delusion is essentially a defense of his love object—himself. It's the cornerstone of his being; without it he'd collapse . . . Instead of admitting failings or weakness in himself, he attributes all his troubles to the machinations of some powerful agency that is out to destroy him . . . [A] paranoiac doesn't believe he has a mental disorder. He
knows
he is intellectually superior.

The definition seemed to fit everything that Brussel knew about the Mad Bomber. The widening pattern of bombings, the arrogant and threatening tone of the letters, the obvious ability of the Bomber to blend inconspicuously into a crowd without detection—they all added up to the workings of a paranoid mind. Armed with this diagnosis, the personality traits and even physical characteristics of the Bomber now began to crystallize in Brussel's mind.

“He's symmetrically built. Perpendicular and girth development in good ratio. Neither fat nor skinny.” The abrupt delivery caught the officers off guard and they regarded him quizzically, as if uncertain of what they had heard.

“How did you arrive at that?” asked a perplexed Finney.

Brussel spoke in assured tones seemingly confident of his opinions, though he knew he was proffering nothing more than a statistical guess. Citing the work of the German psychiatrist Ernest Kretschmer, Brussel explained that a correlation had been observed between body type and psychological disposition. In a study of 10,000 institutionalized individuals, Kretschmer found that a large percentage of schizophrenics, including paranoiacs, possessed what he called the “athletic” body type, that is, medium height to tall with a well-developed and proportioned frame, as opposed to the “asthenic” type, marked by a thin and narrow body, or the “pyknic” type, possessing a more fat or rounded appearance. Brussel told the officers that according to Kretschmer's study, the odds were seventeen in twenty that the Bomber would fall into the “athletic” category. Assuming a diagnosis of paranoia, the statistical odds were with him.

Then, like a shifting gust, Brussel's mind seemed to snap to a higher focus and his brow furrowed with nascent curiosity. He flipped furiously though the documents and searched for the earliest police record of the Bomber's activities. Noting that the first crude bombing attempt occurred in 1940, Brussel's eyes widened and he almost shouted, “He's middle-aged.”

Captain Finney leaned forward and soberly inquired as to the basis of the conclusion. Again, drawing on his extensive knowledge of the likely characteristics of paranoiacs, Brussel explained that the disorder typically grows slowly and insidiously over time, and in most cases does not become fully symptomatic until well past the age of thirty. It was a logical assumption that if the Bomber had first reached the point of acting on his rage nearly sixteen years earlier, he was at least approaching his mid-forties, and perhaps was even older.

As the men pondered the precise age of their suspect, Brussel was already assessing his next deduction. He knew that another primary characteristic of paranoia is a feeling of superiority that would necessarily manifest itself in physical orderliness, precision, and neatness. Since the Bomber's overriding contempt for others would make it difficult to hold a job and thus he wouldn't have much money, his clothing would likely be of an older style but his appearance would otherwise be scrupulously smart and clean. The careful workmanship and precision of the unexploded bombs bore out the meticulous nature of the Bomber, and his ranting letters, though long and irate, appeared carefully written, with few erasures or smudges. “He wants to be flawless,” said Brussel. “He wouldn't stand out as overtly different from anybody else . . . [H]e's probably very neat, tidy, cleanshaven . . . He goes out of his way to seem perfectly proper, a regular man. He may attend church regularly. He wears no ornament, no jewelry, no flashy ties or clothes. He is quiet, polite, methodical, prompt.” Captain Finney nodded with understanding. Slowly, the wraithlike shape of a man was beginning to emerge before his eyes. He could almost reach out and touch him.

For years, the Bomber's letters had been scrupulously analyzed by police investigators and graphologists for any evidence of origin. Repeated use of odd phrasings such as “DASTARDLY DEEDS” and “GHOULISH ACTS,” together with a distinctively Teutonic letter formation— the
G
's in particular, which contained a horizontal double bar within the opening of a capital
C
—led police to the initial conclusion that the Bomber had been born and educated in Germany. Another theory, inexplicably gleaned from the letters, which police adamantly refused to elaborate upon, held that the Bomber had a facial defect of some kind. As Brussel reviewed the same letters, his practiced imagination began to churn. His conclusions regarding handwriting would test the officers' patience like none other.

It was not the
G
's that leapt out at Dr. Brussel but the
W
's. It was his immediate perception that the Bomber's bold and neatly printed block lettering was almost perfect in form. Any flaw in this otherwise obsessively rigid and tidy composition would, to a trained psychiatrist, carry considerable significance. Studying the character formation, he was struck by the shape of the writer's
W
's which, in Brussel's view, often formed a literal double-
U
with distinctively curved lines, as opposed to the typical double-
V
with sharp and pointed features. “It was like a slouching soldier among twenty-five others standing at attention, a drunk at a temperance society meeting. To me, it stood out that starkly,” Brussel would later write. He theorized that something deep within the Bomber had permitted this graphic anomaly to occur—“something inside him so strong that it dodged or bulldozed past his conscience.” Brussel's Freudian mind-set began to take hold. Almost predictably, he concluded that the Bomber's
W
's resembled female breasts or, perhaps even, a scrotum. “Something about sex seemed to be troubling the Bomber,” he thought. “But what?”

He was hesitant to broach the question to the skeptical officers, whose vacant stares betrayed little comprehension of the strange deliberations whirling through the eccentric doctor's mind:

Once again, I realized that the things I was thinking about might seem farfetched to my visitors, for, in trying to get at the reasons why people do otherwise unexplained things, a psychiatrist must allow himself to consider possibilities that would seem rather wild to the layman. It was obvious to me that I'd never crack the puzzle of the Mad Bomber by considering only the man's superficial characteristics or his conscious and obvious motivations.

Brussel returned his attention to the police files and specifically the crime scene photographs, which he urgently scanned anew. His eyes were drawn to a photograph of a slashed theater seat, and he immediately recognized it as the Bomber's odd method of planting his devices in movie houses. The photograph seemed to indicate a savage stabbing and tearing at the bottom of the seat as if by violent impulse, and Brussel silently understood the risky and troublesome nature of the deed as being inconsistent with the otherwise cautious and wary disposition of the man. Again his Freudian mind turned to the sexual character of the act and wondered, “Could the seat symbolize the pelvic region of the human body? In plunging the knife upward into it, had the Bomber been symbolically penetrating a woman? Or castrating a man? Or both?” The implications went to the very heart of his psychiatric philosophies.

Brussel believed strongly in the power of the unresolved Oedipus complex to cause psychological havoc in the male mind. The repressed sexual attraction that a young boy may feel toward his mother and the consequent rivalry he may adopt toward his father are typically reconciled in the childhood years, and a normal, sexually well-adjusted individual emerges. According to Brussel and others sharing his beliefs, however, in some cases, as is found in the paranoiac, the process becomes muddled, and psychosexual problems can result. Brussel was convinced that at the root of the Bomber's behavioral trouble was an Oedipus complex gone awry.

Noting the obvious contempt that the Bomber felt toward Con Ed and the police department as a whole, Brussel drew the broader psychological inference that these male authority figures represented in the Bomber's mind a general disdain for his father. “And now,” thought Brussel in the ultimate nod to Freudian principles:

I had a plausible explanation for his unexplainable act of slashing theater seats. In this act he gave expression to a submerged wish to penetrate his mother or castrate his father, thereby rendering the father powerless—or to do both . . . It [fit] the picture of a man with an overwhelming, unreasonable hatred of men in authority—a man who, for at least sixteen years, had clung to the belief that they were trying to deprive him of something that was rightfully his. Of What? In his letters he called it justice, but this was only symbolic. His unconscious knew what it really was: the love of his mother.

The “inferential mosaic,” as Brussel called it, of the Bomber's personality now began to crystallize, and a quick-paced torrent of impressions flowed from his lips. “A loner,” he said. “He [wants] nothing to do with men—and, since his mother [is] his love, he [is] probably little interested in women either.” Despite this lack of interest in the opposite sex, Brussel explained, the Bomber was not overtly homosexual. He is a classic “lone wolf.” He has no friends and is untroubled by his inability to form lasting relationships, though his fastidious nature requires him to be courteous and well-mannered to all.

“He [is] unmarried [and] quite possibly . . . even a virgin . . . I'll bet he's never even kissed a girl,” he said. The plainclothesmen smiled wryly, but Finney nodded in agreement. The police had earlier theorized that the Bomber, in all probability, lived in a house where he could likely maintain an elaborate workshop, as opposed to an apartment, where noises of his craft would bother neighbors. Since men typically don't reside alone in houses, Brussel theorized that the Bomber would most likely be living with “some older female relative who reminded him of his mother.”

Turning again to the writing samples that were now scattered across his desk, Brussel perceived a certain expressive aptitude (though certainly not eloquence) in the wording and diction. The conveyance of ideas, angry and convoluted as it was, indicated that the writer had some level of academic competence. To Brussel, the letters did not reflect a college education, but they did suggest “at least two years of high school.” The actual language of the Bomber's missives, however, seemed to reveal even more about the writer. The strange phraseology repeatedly found in the letters such as “DASTARDLY DEEDS,” “THE HAND OF GOD,” and “FRUSTRATED GHOULS,” once again caught Brussel's attention. He flipped through the pages, finding example after example of what he called a “stilted tone” and “a total lack of slang or American colloquialisms.” Even the constant reference to “
the
Con Edison” as opposed to the simple and commonly used “Con Ed” suggested to Brussel an odd, uncustomary use of language. These strange word choices, Brussel told the officers, indicated a man who was either foreign born or living within a non-English-speaking community. The letters almost read as if they had been conceived in a foreign tongue and translated into English during their writing. He paused for a moment, then, as if emboldened by the mounting interest of the three officers, Brussel exclaimed, “He is a Slav.”

With head bowed, Finney folded his hands in front of his mouth in a deliberative, almost prayerful, pose. He was aware of the department's speculation that the Bomber might be of German descent, but he had heard no plausible theory to support any other cultural point of origin. He looked up and in a bemused tone asked the doctor for the basis of his audacious conclusion.