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The Mad Bomber terrorized New York City for 16 years between 1940 and 1956, stopping only for a patriotic pause in wartime.
It was a Consolidated Edison clerk named Alice Kelly who aimed the police at Waterbury, Connecticut and George Metesky. Searching employee files she discovered him working in a pre-merger Con Ed company called United Electric & Power. He had suffered an accident at the plant and subsequently developed tuberculosis. His disability benefit denied, he blamed the company and wrote several angry letters swearing revenge. He noted Con Edison's "dastardly deeds."
When the police arrived in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he lived with two unmarried sisters, George Metesky was wearing a bathrobe. They gave him time to dress and then arrested him. He wore a double-breasted suit; it was buttoned, which had been foretold, to an almost spooky degree, by an early forensic scientist named Dr. James Brussel. But this was not until 1956.
It was November 16, 1940, when the man who would be known as The Mad Bomber walked into the Consolidated Edison office, dropped his toolbox, and walked out again. Con Edison workers in the West 64th Street building found a wooden toolbox sitting on a windowsill. Inside was an unexploded pipe bomb with a note wrapped around it: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.”
The Bomb Squad of the NYPD found no fingerprints or other evidence. It was wartime, everybody was busy, and after a cursory investigation, the case was left idle. Only it didn’t go away. A year after the first bomb an alarm clock bomb was found in the gutter near another Con Ed building on West 14th Street. The device was wrapped in an old sock and this time there was no note.
Three months later, the bomber sent a letter to police: “I will make no more bomb units for the duration of the War – My patriotic feelings have made me decide this – Later I will bring the Con Edison to justice – they must pay for their dastardly deeds.”
The Mad Bomber sent other letters over the next nine years signed "F.P." to private citizens, newspapers, cinemas, Con Edison and the police received similar letters. The initials stood for "Fair Play."
The grace period and the War over, New York City faced years of terror as bomb after bomb was discovered in public places all over the city. Starting again on March 29, 1950 at Grand Central Station, more than 30 bombs would be found in phone booths, public libraries, transit stations, and movie theaters. His special method with movie theaters was to slit a seat, tuck in the bomb, and leave by an emergency exit.
On December 2, 1956, the Mad Bomber carried out the act that would galvanize the police into effective action at last. For an evening movie, the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn was filled with holiday shoppers taking a break. It was almost 8PM. When the explosion ripped through the theater six people were injured, three of them seriously.
It seemed only a matter of time before somebody would be killed. The devices were getting more and more powerful and sophisticated; the locations more and more crowded with New Yorkers. The media, without a war on its hands, was on a campaign against the inactivity of the police in the Bomber case. Now that it had been made more aware of the bombings, the public demanded results.
Traditional police methods had gotten them nowhere. At a complete loss, the detectives on the case turned to something new: a criminal profile. Criminal profiling at the time was still experimental and had little legitimate standing among police, but the New York cops were desperate. A Missing Persons Bureau captain recommended Dr. James Brussel, a Manhattan criminal psychiatrist for the work.
Later, once his fame had spread after the Mad Bomber case, Dr. Brussel would be called in on other famous cases, such as the Boston Strangler, the Career Girl Murders, and the Coppolino Case. Forensic profiling today is used routinely to catch criminals, but in 1956, it was a very new practice and police agencies made little use of. It comes as no surprise, really, that detectives who visited Dr. Brussel that day had their doubts.
However, Dr. Brussel was quite specific: The Mad Bomber was a male, middle-aged, meticulous, largely self-educated, Slavic and Roman Catholic, with an Oedipal Complex, who lived in Connecticut. He would have worked for Consolidated Edison or one of its subsidiaries. Dr. Brussel insisted to the skeptical police that to draw out the Bomber, the case and the profile would have to be widely publicized. He also suggested they have Con Edison search its files of past employees.
As the detectives were leaving, Dr. Brussel stopped them. “One more thing,” he said, “When you catch him, and I have no doubt you will, he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit. And it will be buttoned.”
As Dr. Brussel had judged, the widely publicized stories in the press antagonized the Bomber. The more publicity he received, the more arrogant he became, and eventually he tripped himself up.
An open letter published in the “Journal American” prompted a response from Metesky in which he gave a detailed description of his accident and compensation case. Alice Kelly already had the paperwork. The police now had their man.
George Metesky was judged acutely paranoid and committed to an insane asylum, where Dr. Brussel visited him occasionally until the Mad Bomber’s release in 1974. Metesky returned to his home in Waterbury, Connecticut and lived to the ripe old age of 90, dying in 1994.
His legacy lives on in the Zodiac Killer and the Unabomber and who knows how many more imitators to come.
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