The Mad Bomber

BOMB IN GRAND CENTRAL

BOMB-FOUND IN SEAT
OF B'WAY MOVIE HOUSE!

Mad Bomber's New Attempt
Spurs Hunt by 20,000 Cops

15 MORE BOMB SCARES

CRACKPOTS ON "BOMB" SPREE

As any goggle-eyed New Yorker could guess from reading the biggest and blackest headlines, the "Mad Bomber" had struck. His calling card: a crude but workable bomb made of gunpowder, set to be detonated by a cheap watch movement wired to a flashlight battery--all contained in a short (2-5 in.) length of ordinary pipe capped at both ends. And, to provide the final touch, the pipe was stuffed into a man's red sock.

He had been striking, on and off--so police said--for the last 16 years, but only now had the harassed New York City cops decided to let the city newspapers play the story up big, in the hope that wide publicity would flush him out. Besides, the Mad Bomber's latest activities were such that the cops could hardly keep the case to themselves.

Do It Yourself. Last month in a Brooklyn movie house, a pipe-bomb exploded, injured seven people. On Christmas Eve a page found a sock-wrapped bomb in a telephone booth of the New York Public Library. Three days later the bomb squad followed a tip to Times Square's famed Paramount Theater, searched high and low after the last show, found another pipe-bomb hidden in a seventeenth-row seat. Two detectives dressed in protective steel clothing gingerly loaded the bomb into a steel-mesh enclosed police truck, whisked it out to a lonely beach and set it off.

It was about then that sophisticated New Yorkers knew that the Mad Bomber was not just whistling through his teeth; the sensation-loving papers cheerfully nursed the tautening nerves. Off the presses came a rash of interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists, jewelers, bomb experts, handwriting experts, cops, scientists. Columnists discoursed learnedly on the psychopathic makeup of the man who so desperately wanted recognition, speculated on everything from his childhood to his sex drives (either weak or strong, depending on the columnist). Hearst's Journal-American thoughtfully provided a do-it-yourself spread on how to make a pipe-bomb; Scripps-Howard's World-Telegram and Sun gave an artist's rendering of the Bomber's face (details for which were somehow set forth by a handwriting expert).

Goose Chases. Suddenly police switchboards jammed with calls telling of planted bombs. Detectives by the squad were kept on the run (107 times last week alone) to such public landmarks as Madison Square Garden, Grand Central Terminal, Yankee Stadium, the new Coliseum and the Empire State Building, sometimes came up with a firecracker or an empty piece of pipe, and only once (at the Paramount) with the real goods. Said one weary cop: "This city has plenty of wacks with a screwball sense of humor."

At week's end the papers, thirsty and cunning in a news-dry holiday period, were still going strong. Everybody but the cops was enjoying the thrill. But there was not a man in his right mind who dared to buy a cheap watch, a small piece of pipe or a pair of red socks.

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