One-Man Bombing Spree Leaves FBI, Victims Baffled

SALT LAKE CITY — It was Gary Wright’s turn to be the victim of a random curse.

Wright, a 26-year-old employee of a small computer sales and service company a couple miles from Utah’s Capitol, just happened to pick up a burlap bag in the parking lot behind the store on the morning of Feb. 20.

Inside the bag was a homemade pipe bomb, prepared to detonate at the touch. It exploded.

Wright wound up spending the weekend in the hospital, being treated for arm, leg and face cuts and wondering why he, of all people, became a victim.

For years a lot of people have asked the same question after their lives were blown apart by a baffling one-man string of bombings that has stretched across the country since 1978.

There was Art Plotnick, the Chicago magazine editor who, with 79 other people, happened to be on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington when a bomb exploded in the cargo section after takeoff in 1979, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing.

There was Percy Wood, who when president of United Airlines in 1980 received a book in the mail that exploded when he opened it in his home, cutting and burning his hands and face.

There was John Hauser, a U.S. Air Force captain whose dream of being an astronaut was shattered along with his right hand in May, 1985, when he tried to open a package left in a small lab at UC Berkeley.

And there was Campbell Scrutton, the owner of a Sacramento computer shop, who--much like Gary Wright--found a package outside the rear door of his store in December, 1985. The parcel, wrapped in paper and tied with string, contained a pipe bomb that blew up, shooting shrapnel more than 400 feet. Scrutton died a half hour later.

According to federal investigators, those individuals, along with four others, were the victims of a suspect with a grudge against people or institutions involved in computers or aviation.

That is specific enough to be intriguing and broad enough to be of almost no help to investigators. Nevertheless, last week nearly 100 of them mustered in Salt Lake City, their hopes fueled by their first description of the suspect by a witness, which has allowed authorities to develop and publicize a composite drawing.

The bomber--identifiable only by the similarity of the shards that each of his bombs have left--has planted or mailed explosive devices 12 times since May, 1978, according to investigators.

Ten times the bombs have exploded, and on all but one of those occasions someone has been hurt.

Besides Scrutton’s death and the 12 people on the airliner treated for smoke inhalation, seven others have been injured by bombs made out of everything from screws to fishing line to batteries to handmade switches.

Bomber’s Other Targets

The bomber’s other targets have included a pair of college engineering buildings in Illinois, Boeing Aircraft in Washington state, a college business building in Utah and a computer science professor in Nashville.

One site--UC Berkeley--has been hit twice. In 1982, an electrical engineering professor, Diogenes Anelakos, was injured by one of the bomber’s packages. Three years later, Hauser was injured by another bomb placed in the same campus computer science building. Anelakos gave first aid until the paramedics came.

Berkeley has offered a $10,000 reward for the bomber and last week the Postal Service announced in Salt Lake City that it has doubled its original $25,000 reward.

The bomber, so lacking in a pattern of behavior that authorities have yet to devise a nickname, has a peculiar combination of technical aptitude, guile, patience and no apparent desire to see the results of his handiwork.

Baited His Victims

He sometimes addresses his bombs to specific individuals and sometimes simply leaves them at targeted sites for someone to pick up. On two occasions he appears to have baited his victims by sending them letters telling them that packages would arrive.

One of those letters preceded the hollowed-out book sent to airline President Wood, who probably would have died if the pipe bomb and pressure-sensitive switch nestled in the book had been properly constructed, authorities said. The suspect apparently tries to avoid postal identification by using stamps, rather than taking packages to post offices to be metered.

“This guy is careful,” one investigator said. “He seems to pull them out of thin air.”

FBI agents and postal investigators have pored over thousands of names supplied by victims (“They want to know who your mother’s enemies were in high school,” said one bombing victim.). FBI specialists in motivation have drafted several personality profiles. But according to one law enforcement man who has read them, the profiles are so general “that if we put them out we’d get data back on every weirdo in the United States.”

Befuddlement and Frustration

The investigators’ befuddlement is matched by frustration among many of the victims--particularly those sent bombs by mail--who have tried to figure out why the bomber picked them and whether he might pick them again.

“I’d like to know why he’s angry with me,” said James McConnell, a University of Michigan professor who received a bomb inside a mailed parcel in November, 1985. A research assistant who opened the package at McConnell’s home suffered minor injuries in the explosion.

The suspect’s selection of McConnell seems to illustrate his awareness of the fields he attacks. On the surface, McConnell lies outside the bomber’s computer-phobia pattern, since he is a professor of psychology. However, he has specialized in researching how computers can improve education.

“I have this respect now for psychos,” added one of the employees in Scrutton’s Sacramento computer store, who watched Scrutton die and asked that his name not be published because he still lives with the anxiety of knowing the bomber is loose. “No one is immune . . . we still don’t even park in the back of the store. We don’t use the back door. It’s like the door in ‘The Exorcist.’ ”

Work of Serial Bomber

It was not until last Monday, when authorities held a press conference to say they were sure the explosion that injured Wright was the work of the serial bomber, that the string of incidents received extensive national publicity.

For years, the FBI and federal postal inspectors had labored to solve the case quietly. Then, after Scrutton’s death, they appealed to the public for leads. Beyond Northern California, the publicity was not extensive and the tips were not productive.

24-Hour Hot Line

So when the bomber next struck in Salt Lake City, 14 months later, authorities were ready. They converged here within a day (“I’ve never seen this many people show up at an incident so fast,” one Salt Lake City detective said), and established a task force and a 24-hour hot line. Because two of the bombs have been mailed from Utah and two others planted there, authorities feel there is a chance the suspect has some ties to the state and may still be in the region.

The witness who said he saw the suspected bomber plant the device an hour before Wright picked it up described a slender man, 25 to 30, about 6 feet tall with a ruddy complexion, light mustache and curly reddish-blond hair.

“This is the best thing that ever happened in the whole series,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Lt. Ray Biondi, the chief investigator of Scrutton’s death, who came to Salt Lake City to confer with the task force. “The leads are beginning to come.”