Serial Killer Investigations Read Free Page A

immigrant; the letters contained no Americanisms. Further, stilted Victorian phrases such as ‘they will pay for their dastardly deeds’ suggested a member of the older generation. The bomber, said Brussel, was obviously a paranoiac, a man far gone in persecution mania, one who has allowed himself to become locked into an inner world of hostility and resentment; everyone is plotting against him and he trusts no one. But because he is so close to the verge of insanity, he is careful, meticulous, highly controlled—the bomber’s block-capital letters were beautifully neat. Brussel’s experience of paranoia suggested that it most often develops in the mid-thirties. Since the first bomb was planted in 1940, this suggested that the bomber must now be in his mid-fifties.
    Brussel was a Freudian—as were most psychiatrists of that period—and he observed that the only letters that stood out from the others were the ‘W’s, formed from two rounded ‘U’s, which resembled breasts. From this Brussel deduced that the bomber was still a man with strong sex drives, and that he had probably had trouble with his mother. He also noted that the cinema bombs had been planted inside W-shaped slashes, and that these again had some sexual connotation. Brussel’s final picture of the bomber was of a man in his fifties, Slavic in origin, neat and precise in his habits, and who lived in some better part of New York with an elderly mother or female relative. He was—or had been—a good Catholic. He was of strong build. And finally, he was the type who wore double-breasted suits.
    Some of these deductions were arrived at by study of the letters—the meticulousness, obsessive self-control—and others by a process of elimination: the bomber was not American, but the phrasing was not German, Italian, or Spanish, so the likeliest alternative was a Slav. The majority of Slavs are Catholic, and the letters sometimes revealed a religious obsession...
    Meanwhile, the Journal American had printed a third appeal, this one promising that if the bomber gave further details of his grievances, the newspaper would do its best to reopen his case. This brought a typewritten reply that contained the requested details:
    I was injured on 5 September 1931. There were over twelve thousand danger signs in the plant, yet not even First Aid was available or rendered to me. I had to lay on cold concrete... Mr Reda and Mr Hooper wrote telling me that the $180 I got in sick benefits (that I was paying for) was ample for my illness.
    Again, the signature was ‘F. P’
    Now that investigators had a date, Con Edison clerical employees were put to work searching the corporation’s voluminous personnel files. There was still no guarantee that a file dating back to 1931 would exist, but a worker named Alice Kelly eventually located it. The file concerned George Metesky, born in 1904, who had been working as a generator wiper in 1931 at the Hell Gate power station of the United Electric & Power Company, later absorbed by Con Edison. On 5 September 1931, Metesky had been caught in a boiler blowback and inhaled poisonous gases. These caused haemorrhages, which most likely brought on his subsequent pneumonia and tuberculosis—although there was no definitive proof. His doctors sent him to Arizona to recuperate, but he’d been forced to return to Waterbury, Connecticut—where he lived—because of lack of funds. He had received only $180 in sick benefits, and the file contained letters from the men called Reda and Hooper that he had mentioned.
    The police lost no time in getting to Waterbury, taking with them a search warrant. The man who opened the door of the ramshackle four-storey house in an industrial area wore gold-framed glasses, and peered mildly at the policemen from a round, gentle face. He identified himself as George Metesky, and allowed the officers to come in. He lived in the 14-room house with two elderly half-sisters, May and Anna Milausky, daughters of