VI
CHASING SHADOWS
NOW, METESKY’S PACE BEGAN TO QUICKEN AND CONFUSION SEEMED TO reign within the press as well as throughout the floundering police force. On January 11, 1955, he struck Penn Station during the evening rush hour, blowing a two-inch gouge into a concrete wall and sending clouds of smoke billowing through the lower level of the terminal. As detectives cordoned off the surrounding area and conducted a detailed search for fragments and additional devices, Metesky placed a telephone call to the switchboard operator of Grand Central Station, warning that a bomb had been placed in a coin-operated locker on the south side of the building and that it would detonate in fifteen minutes. A frenzied team of thirty additional officers rushed to the scene and conducted a painstaking search that turned up nothing.
Though there were no injuries from the Penn Station blast, the New York newspapers were almost comically inconsistent with their descriptions of the effect the bombing had on the public. Clearly torn between their responsibility to report the news and their desire to honor the continued police requests to play down the details, the New York Times buried the story with the restrained headline “Penn Station Bomb Blast Is Ignored by Commuters.” The effusive New York Daily News, however, brought the story to page 3 with the lead “Bomb Goes Off, Panics LI Rush-Hour Throng.” And, in a clear attempt to compromise, the New York Herald Tribune, though placing the story at the bottom of page 1, went with the less controversial “Penn Station Bomb Startles Commuters.” Two months later, the New York newspapers similarly reported on another of Metesky’s Penn Station bombings, but it was, ironically, an unexploded device planted by him, again at Radio City Music Hall, that would capture the attention—and fears—of the city.
At 5:34 on the evening of May 2, 1955, an editor of the New York Herald Tribune received an anonymous phone call from a man who informed him that a bomb had been placed at Radio City. The voice, bristling with anger, insisted that the act was carried out “to get even with the Consolidated Edison Co.” Within minutes, an army of sixty firemen, police officers, and bomb squad detectives converged upon the theater, roped off the area, and, for the next hour and a half, conducted an extensive search of the premises. The investigation yielded nothing, and detectives nervously reopened the theater to movie patrons, concluding that the scare had been nothing but another maddening false alarm.
Later that evening, after the theater had closed and the cleaning crew had begun its nightly task of removing candy wrappers and soda cups from the seats and floors of the auditorium, one of the workers, while scouring the floor beneath seat 125 of the orchestra section, banged into a strange object with his mop handle. With curiosity aroused, the worker knelt down to investigate and there spotted what an extensive ninety-minute police search had failed to reveal: the Mad Bomber’s latest creation wrapped in a red wool men’s sock.
For the second time that evening, police and emergency personnel descended upon Radio City Music Hall. With the usual array of armored bomb squad detectives and equipment on hand, the neatly capped three-and-a-half-inch length of galvanized iron pipe was removed from the premises and transported to a deserted area near the waterfront at West Fifty-third Street, where it was examined and guarded by technicians. As morning approached, the device was brought to the stark concrete military bunkers of Fort Tilden, Queens, a United States Army installation commonly shared with local police for the storing and dismantling of the Bomber’s creations.
After three days at Fort Tilden it was determined by squad detectives that the bomb could be safely defused. An option that earlier had been considered and rejected was the use of a so-called “shaped charge” to direct a quick and controlled explosion specifically focused on the end cap of the device, thereby opening the bomb and exposing its undamaged inner workings. While the technique worked in theory, oftentimes the intense charge would have the unintended result of exploding the bomb itself, and it was therefore considered too risky to attempt under the circumstances. In short, the detectives simply did not want to risk a rare opportunity to inspect the Bomber’s latest handiwork.
Using specially fashioned tools, squad detective William Schmitt slowly unscrewed one of the iron plugs, careful to avoid the possibility of a detonative spark. With the device open and its mechanics exposed, he cautiously removed the wires running to the battery, thereby neutralizing the bomb.
Once deactivated, the technicians examined the familiar design and components of the device and confirmed what they already knew: the bomb was the creation of the same individual that had eluded them for years. Fortunately for the 4,500 moviegoers who were in attendance that evening at Radio City Music Hall, the timing mechanism of the device, set for 6:30 p.m., had malfunctioned. A defect in the cheap watch chosen by the Bomber had caused it to stop dead before the hour hand could reach its baleful point of contact. The intact bomb now held by police, however, would serve as a roadmap for the future of the investigation—and an unintended turning point in public awareness of the case.
Further police analysis would reveal that the Radio City bomb, as was the case with most of Metesky’s other devices, was capable of causing death or serious injury to anyone in proximity had it detonated, and the police department officially branded it a “lethal weapon.” The New York media—television, radio, and print—were quick to react with detailed and inflammatory coverage. Unlike the newspapers’ treatment of the prior incidents, there was nothing equivocal or restrained in the reporting of the attempted Radio City bombing. The New York Journal-American chillingly proclaimed, “Radio City Bomb Found to Be Deadly,” while the front page banner headline of the Mirror shrieked, “City Hunts Mad Bomb Planter.” And across America, the wire services informed anxious readers of a “Mad Bomber Being Hunted in New York.”
As the doings of the Mad Bomber became more public and the citizens of New York more uneasy, the pressure on the New York City Police Department to make an arrest began to increase. Some of the top brass of the department, including deputy chief inspector Edward Byrnes, chief of detectives James Leggett, inspector in charge of technical services Edward Fagan, captain in charge of the police laboratory Howard Finney, and even police commissioner Stephen Kennedy himself, assumed greater organizational roles and became more involved in the day-to-day activities and decisions of the investigation as opposed to mere policy making. From a detailed study of the bombings, these officials knew that the “diabolical genius,” as he was called by one New York newspaper, was capable on a whim of dramatically increasing the size and potency of his bombs and even attacking a bridge or a crowded train. A palpable fear began to stir in the city of New York, and a growing frustration brewed within the police department. The Mad Bomber needed to be stopped.
In the coming months of 1955, as New Yorkers nervously went about their business, infernal machines continued to turn up throughout the city. In August, a cheap pocketknife and an ominous-looking length of pipe wrapped in a wool sock slipped from a tear in a movie seat as it was being repaired by an upholsterer at the Roxy Theatre. Though unexploded, the bomb caused the usual ruckus and traffic snarls, as detectives, using their steel-mesh envelope, whisked the device out of the building with five hundred curious bystanders looking on from behind police lines. The signature dud had been left by Metesky some two years earlier and had remained undetected since then. In October, a man was slightly injured as a bomb exploded in the twelfth row of the Paramount Theatre in Times Square during an evening showing of Blood Alley, and in December, emergency crews dispersed a large crowd of rush-hour commuters in Grand Central Terminal who had gathered for a look after an explosion ripped through the upper level in the main men’s lavatory.
With city newspapers maintaining a foreboding (though often inaccurate) count of the Bomber’s sorties, the police department was forced to divert extraordinary resources to the case. Time, money, and manpower typically expended in other crime-fighting or community endeavors was redirected to the investigation, and officers wi
th little formal training in explosives became adjunct deputies of the city bomb squad. Following the second Radio City incident, extra details of detectives—fifty additional men in all—were assigned to covertly watch rail stations, bus terminals, and movie theaters, with special instructions to search for suspicious characters carrying packages of any kind. Crime lab technicians conducted detailed technical analyses of past unexploded devices as well as fragments from the ones that had exploded, and opinions and conclusions were taking shape as to the Bomber’s motives, capabilities, and vocations. An exhaustive study of numerous samples of handwriting as well as reliable firsthand descriptions of the Bomber’s voice (derived from the various advance warning calls that had been placed) provided a baseline source of comparison as well as clues into his background and even ethnicity. His routines and assumed habits had been examined and re-examined. Police detectives had, in short, become intimately familiar with the behaviors and persona of the Mad Bomber. As one commentator wrote of the police investigation, “You are dealing with a man who can be described in such detail that at times you feel he is sitting in the room with you, just across from you . . . The picture of him that has slowly been blocked in over the years almost comes alive before your eyes . . .”
Yet for all the police did know about him, the Bomber remained as elusive and faceless as he was on the first day of the investigation. Even the mundane tasks of simple police work frustrated detectives at every turn. The Bomber’s assiduous selection of commonplace materials for use in his devices made tracking them virtually impossible, and, to the utter consternation of the bomb squad, rendered analysis utterly fruitless.
“I personally have taken the watch-timing mechanism from one of the bombs this clown has made to 75 stores around Times Square,” lamented Detective William Schmitt. “Every one stocked that watch.”
Investigating the possible origins of the bomb casings, squad Detective Joseph Rothengast remarked that he “once spent a solid day going to plumbing-supply stores. Every one stocked the kind of pipe I had. And every one looked at me as if I had holes in my head when I asked if there was any way to trace this particular piece.”
By the start of 1956, frustrated by the lack of any concrete leads in the case, police again found themselves chasing shadows. On February 21, a seventy-four-year-old porter named Lloyd Hill, who was working on the lower level of Penn Station, was informed by a young man that there was a clog in a toilet in the men’s washroom. Shortly before four o’clock in the afternoon, as Hill applied a plunger to the obstruction, the fixture exploded, firing shards of metal and porcelain in every direction—and into Hill’s head and legs. “The whole inside of the booth was wrecked. People were running in every direction, scared. So was I,” reported one witness. “The porter must have been seriously hurt. He was bleeding all over. I could see blood on his face, hands, arms and legs as police arrived.” Hill would recover from his injuries, but the thirty detectives investigating the explosion, led by Chief James Leggett, were dismayed to find threads of a familiar red wool sock, charred remains of a watch frame, and fragments of an iron pipe casing that had been carefully waterproofed with a paraffin coating among the rubble of the Penn Station washroom. The next day, newspapers reported that the FBI had joined city and railroad police in the search for the Mad Bomber.
In the coming years, Metesky would insist that he felt “sick” over the prospect of causing injuries, but in the same breath he blamed the police for failing to properly evacuate targeted areas after receiving prior warnings. In any event, he would continue, “I took an oath to keep on placing them until I was dead or caught.”
By the end of summer 1956, Metesky would strike an IRT subway train (by chance containing only three passengers), a telephone booth at Macy’s in Herald Square, and the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. He would later admit to planting several other bombs in 1956 that apparently failed to detonate and were ultimately unaccounted for—including one in the Empire State Building—which, as far as anyone knows, could still be unceremoniously lodged into a little-noticed cranny of the 37 million cubic foot structure a half-century later. The RCA bomb, however, would immediately illustrate the untoward consequences and unpredictable results of Metesky’s endeavors.
On the afternoon of August 4, a security guard at the RCA building had stumbled upon what he thought to be a harmless length of pipe that he thought could be put to good use. He gave the pipe to another guard, one William Kirwan, who, near the end of his shift, showed his prize to a third guard named Thomas Dorney, who was preparing for the 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. shift. As the two men talked, Kirwan playfully batted his palm with the end of the pipe and told Dorney that he could have it if he wanted. “You never know when a piece of pipe is going to come in handy,” said Dorney, accepting the gift. Dorney carried the pipe with him all that evening throughout his guard duties and during the bus ride home after work. Upon arriving at his house on Fifty-ninth Street, West New York, New Jersey, he removed from his pocket the length of pipe and a small card bearing a picture of Jesus that he got earlier in the day at a friend’s funeral, placed both on the kitchen table, and went to bed.
At precisely 6:00 a.m. the Dorney family was awakened by what they described as a sound “like two cars coming together.” Rushing into the kitchen, Dorney, fighting the pungent smoke, witnessed what his wife would later describe as “a mess . . . like an atomic bomb hit it.” “I haven’t been as religious as I ought to be before,” explained Dorney. “[B]ut I’m very religious now; that’s a cinch.”
With each new incident, the police learned more and more about the Bomber—except for his identity. Their files brimmed with fascinating and for the most part disjointed and worthless pieces of information. As the winter of 1956 approached, the top brass of the department were forced to admit that their investigation was going nowhere. “His face remains a blank no matter how you try to visualize it,” wrote one reporter, summing up the mood of the police. “And this juxtaposition of feelings, knowing so much yet nothing at all, can suddenly give you the sensation, after hours and days of talking with detectives and thumbing through records, that you are walking down the streets crowded with gray and faceless men, looking for a man you wouldn’t recognize.”
The New York police were not the only ones frustrated with the flow of information. With all the destructive energy George Metesky had brought to bear upon the greatest city in the world, his seething hatred of Con Ed had yet to be sated. The newspapers were printing the details of his bombings but had failed, in any meaningful way, to capture the purpose and significance of the campaign—to expose to the world the brutal actions of his mortal enemy and to exact, once and for all, his full measure of vengeance upon them. The frustration churned within like an ulcer.
. . . WHILE VICTIMS GET BLASTED—THE YELLOW PRESS MAKES NO MENTION OF THESE GHOULISH ACTS. THESE SAME GHOULS CALL ME A PSYCHOPATH— ANY FURTHER REFERENCE TO ME AS SUCH—OR THE LIKE—WILL BE DEALT WITH—WHERE EVER A WIRE RUNS—GAS OR STEAM FLOWS—FROM OR TO THE CON EDISON CO.—IS NOW A BOMB TARGET—SO FAR 54 BOMBS PLACED—4 TELEPHONE CALLS MADE. THESE BOMBINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL CON EDISON IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE—MY LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THIS TASK— EXPECT NO CALLS ABOUT BOMBS IN THEATERS AS YOUR ACTIONS—NO LONGER WARRANT THE EFFORT OR DIME—ALL MY SUFFERINGS—ALL MY FINANCIAL LOSS—WILL HAVE TO BE PAID IN FULL—IT MUST ALARM—ANGER AND ANNOY THE N.Y. YELLOW PRESS & AUTHORITIES TO FIND THAT ANY INDIVIDUAL CAN BE JUST AS MEAN—DIRTY AND ROTTEN AS THEY ARE. I MERELY SEEK JUSTICE.
F.P.
The editors of the Herald Tribune again delivered the letter to police brass and wondered, along with the rest of the city, what the Bomber’s next move would be. Meanwhile, the evening showing of War and Peace was only hours away as George Metesky rolled down his driveway and headed for the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, New York.
VII
THE “TWELFTH STREET PROPHET”
THE MODESTLY APPOINTED TENTH-FLOOR APARTMENT IN GREENWICH Village had become one par
t family home, one part psychiatric office, and one part bird sanctuary. Parakeets flying freely throughout the Twelfth Street high-rise could be seen fluttering before the thin face of the eccentric homeowner, stealing bite-size parcels of food strategically placed between his upper and lower front teeth—a position typically reserved for his smoldering pipe. A pencil-line mustache accented otherwise gaunt and wiry features that provided only a hint of the brusque and authoritative nature of the man within. “It is a comfortable enough face . . . ,” he would write in his memoir. “It is an ordinary human face, marked by the tracks of many years.” A New York columnist would describe Dr. James A. Brussel as simply, “Bow-tied, Mustachioed and Natty.”
From his office at one end of the apartment, family members on the other could hear him, on any given day, impatiently shouting at patients undergoing heartrending psychoanalysis. His more subdued moments were spent composing crossword puzzles for the New York Times and other syndicated newspapers across the country. His submissions were so frequent that he was often forced to present his puzzles under assumed or pen names. A prolific and incessant writer (in 1959 he boasted 250,000 words in a period of ten months), Brussel authored a variety of books on psychiatry and a full-length published novel titled Just Murder, Darling, in which the antagonist commits murder—and gets away with it. “[A] man has to be paranoid to turn out something like that,” he once said with a broad smile. “So I guess I am. I have a dirty, rotten, no-good mind and my wife and I laugh about it all the time.”
The Mad Bomber of New York Page 8