The Mad Bomber of New York by Michael M. Greenburg Page B

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.
    â€œI 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