Welcome to our next series of episodes from The Path Went Chili. Ashley is doing a book tour right now, so she's traveling and is quite busy, so we figured we give her a couple more weeks off and Jewles and I will record this week's episode alone and we'll follow our standard format where I share details about the case with Jewels and she'll give off her live reaction. So, Jules, have you ever heard of the zip gun bomber?
No? I have not.
Well, this is an interesting one. I've only ever covered it on a Patreon bonus episode of The Trail Went Cold, so this might be new to a lot of our listeners, and it involves a serial offender who has never been identified. If you haven't heard the term zip gun before, it's a term they often used to describe crude, homemade firearms
that are manufactured by people who are not professionals. And what happened is that, over the course of a decade, five different people got mailed packages containing hollow books like cookbooks, and it was booby trapped so that whenever they opened them, a small little pistol would go off and fire bullets
towards them. One victim got killed during the nineteen eighties, and it was quiet for another decade, but then four more people over the course of three years would get mail packages containing zip gun bombs, and thankfully, even though bullets were fired, none of these victims were killed. But the whole thing was so bizarre because investigators looked really hard could not find a connection between all these victims.
It just appeared that they were picked at random. And to this day, the perpetrator has never been identified and no one can figure out what their motive was.
That's wild. There's something about this case. Maybe it's the indiscriminate nature of it and the fact that the perpetrator was never caught that reminds me of the Thailand all murders. But there's also something about it that chain letters and like urban legends are made of, right, or I guess the urban legend of chain letters are made of. It's a really compelling idea that somebody would target these people
seemingly at random. You have to wonder if there is a victim that is buried within all of these victims that they're trying to hide their connection to, and perhaps it's just a hidden variable, and investigators have never found that connection.
Yes, and we're definitely going to be making a lot of comparisons to the Thailand all murders, and if any of you are not familiar with it, that involved a still unidentified offender who would go and put poisoned tail in all capsules in bottles on the shelf, and then random people would purchase them, take them and then wound
up being poisoned. And in that particular case, it just felt like someone who wanted to cause chaos, because there's no way they could have known ahead of time which people would take this poison tile and all and die. But here they had to go to the trouble of selecting someone's name, finding their address, and booby trapping a book to mail to them and hoping that they would
open it and be shot and killed. But we still have no idea why he selected these particular victims, and why one of these incidents took place in the eighties and all the rest took place in the nineties. Were they all done by the same person or was it a copycat someone who heard about the original murder from the eighties and then just decided to try it themselves.
This is so interesting and it makes you wonder if the original victim was the intended victim, and then the killer was sated and they didn't feel the need to continue killing, and perhaps there was a triggering moment in their life, something stressful happened, a move, maybe the end of a relationship, something to that effect, and it caused them to ramp up again and continue on with what they started. Or perhaps, like you said, it was a copycat.
But there's something about this that is so similar to the Thailand Ald murders because it does seem indiscriminate, but it does appear to be calculated in a way that the tailand all murders were so chaotic. You don't know who is going to pick up that bottle of tailanol and purchase it, and so what the end result will be will likely be murder or mayhem, but you don't know who will be the victim, whereas this is very specific. You're targeting specific individuals. And I really wonder how the
killer came upon these people to be victims. Did they just meet them in a coffee shop, maybe they were rude to them, They looked up their information in it was the eighties, so I guess a phone book and then decided to send something to their address, or did you just pick these people at random?
That could be it. I mean, like you said, this was the pre internet age, so it'd be very difficult to look up someone's name if they did something like was room to you in the coffee shop. But if you're driven enough and you just want to hurt somebody so badly, then there are ways to pull this off. So the first crime took place in Brooklyn in nineteen eighty two. All these crimes we're going to talk about took place in New York City. The first victim seemed
like an unlikely target. Her name was Joan Kip. She was a fifty four year old guidance counselor supervisor for the Board of Education in school District number twenty, and she lived a normal life in the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn with her fifty seven year old husband, Howard Kip, and the couple also had two adult children who had since moved out, a twenty seven year old son named Craig and a thirty one year old daughter named Doreen.
Joan finished off work on the afternoon Friday, May the seventh, and because the following weekend was Mother's Day. She was planning to leave on a weekend outing with her husband in order to spend the Mother's Day at the family summer home in Connecticut. So when she got home, her husband, Howard, had not arrived yet, but Joan came across a package which was addressed to her and it had been delivered
earlier that day and was postmarked from Staten Island. And when Joan opened the package, she discovered a series gourmet cookbook inside and just assumed it was a Mother's Day gift from someone. But when she opened the book, she was taken by complete surprise when a series of bullets were fired off at her and two of them wound
up striking the left side of her chest. Afterwards, they looked into this whole package and they found out that the cookbook was hollowed out and had been rigged as a booby trap with a crewde homemade zip gun which was assembled with a pair of six volt D batteries, a metal plate with copper wiring from a brake line, green stainless steel tubes, and a screw from a ballpoint pan spring which was used as a trigger mechanism, and three twenty two caliber cartridges were inside the steel tubes
and their bases had all been removed to expose the gunpowder. The firing pins at all have been removed, and the filament of a light bulb was stuck into the gunpowder and connected to the wires from the battery, and the device was rigged to go off when the book was opened, causing the wires to spark the gunpowder and discharge the three bullets in three different directions, and unfortunately two of them wound up striking Joan.
This sounds pretty complex, and given that this was the nineteen eighties, the individual that made this wouldn't have access to the Internet or any of the dark web forums that would give you the know how to build a
zip gun. But in this case, it would lend itself to the idea that this individual either had some kind of sophisticated knowledge about engineering or maybe potentially about firearms, or I'm not sure, maybe they would have to have knowledge about both, because this sounds as the way that you've described it as it was pretty intricate.
It is. Yeah, like this is pretty much the only documented case I know of where someone has sent a package through the mail that has been rigged in this specific fashion, and that's why this case stands out. I don't know if any other zip gun bombers or any other copycats who have rigged a device in this fashion.
And you're right, this is the pre internet world, so it wouldn't have been that easy to dig up this information about how to assemble something like this, which is why it's easy to assume that this was someone with a lot of mechanical knowledge, who had a lot of experience with firearms and knew the proper way to rig up a booby trap.
This is truly the stuff of nightmares. I can't imagine what Joan must have experienced. She opens up this cookbook, she thinks it's an early mother's ey gift from her children. What a sweet gesture, and then she opens it, opens up the cover, the zip gun gives two shots to Joan's chest. She must have been so terrified and just questioning who could do this? I mean, who knows what goes through one's mind at that time, but to be shot twice and to be all alone at home, it would be so terrifying.
And unfortunately she did not survive. She did live long enough that she managed to the phone and called for medical assistance, and almost immediately thereafter, her husband, Howard, finally came home and actually said that he heard the loud noise of the guns firing while he was outside the
door and then ran inside. So Joan was still conscious at this point and he heard her say quote there may be others And while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Joan also told her husband to contact the school district's superintendent so that she could warnant all the other educators and school employees in the area about what happened. And there's been some question about this. Did Joan have some
suspicions about who may have done this? Did she think there was a specific individual who might be targeting guidance counselors or educators in the area. But unfortunately she didn't get an opportunity to be questioned because after she was rushed to the hospital, she passed away three and a half hours later.
That is such a curious statement to be made by Joan in that moment where she's thinking who could have
done this? The first thing that comes to her mind, it seems, is that there could be an individual or group of individuals that could be targeting educators, And it makes me wonder if she'd received some type of threat in the past from somebody, or maybe it was recent and she just hadn't shared her concerns because she just brushed it off, and that's why she automatically jumped to thinking that it was educators that could be under threat.
Did you think that, Joan, meant that there could potentially be more victims out there, like there could have been victims in the past, or there could be future potential victims. Is that how you took it?
I kind of did. Yeah. I mean, they did not have any more packages that were mailed out, no other educators in the area were targeted. But just the fact that she's probably in complete shock and she still has the wherewithal to say this to her husband and while she's waiting for the ambulance to arrive, does give me the impression that she might have had suspicions about somebody and maybe thought that there was a plot a foot to target educators. But like I said, unfortunately she passed
away before she could be questioned. But I know that's always going to haunt her family, because obviously, if you find a cookbook in a package, that sent you that's rigged a fire off a gun, something that's completely unprecedent. At that point, you're not immediately going to be thinking who did this to me because it is such a specific thing. So did she know someone who actually had
knowledge of building booby traps with guns? And that popped into her head, but she just never got the opportunity to say this person's name.
That is a terrifying thought. Given what Jona had experienced, you'd think in that moment that she would be in a state of shock, and maybe the coming up with the fact that it could be somebody who is targeting educators could be a result of shock. But I don't want to write off what her gut feeling was or what the thing that came to her mind was. And it's just it's really hard not to think that Joan
knew something, or that she knew more. And it's just so unfortunate that she passed away for a multitude of reasons, but one of them being maybe she had a lead as to who the killer was.
And what's also interesting is that they would find a hastily scribbled note on the inside cover of the cookbook, though it's unclear if Joan had the opportunity to read it before she was shot. But even though the package was specifically addressed to Joan, the message was addressed to Howard and it said, quote Howard, You're dead first Joan, then Craig and Doreen end quote, and the name Joan
was specifically crossed out. So this gave off the impression that someone had a personal grudge against Howard and was going to wipe out his family one by one. But Craig and Doreen and Howard never received any more packages, and Howard always maintains that he has no idea who would have wanted to do that, to send a booby travel book and have such a personal grudge that they would want to murder his entire family.
I truly feel for Howard and the whole family here. I can't imagine how scared he must have been. But this note makes me wonder a couple of things. Was Howard the primary target or is this a red herring? Are we trying to point away from Howard. If it was Joan and there was a connection to Joan, it might be advantageous for the killer to try to make it look like Howard was the primary target and everybody
else was just collateral damage. But it's also giving a Long Island serial killer vibe rex Huerman in the way that he tortured the family members of the victims after they were deceased. He did so with Shannon Gilbert's sister, and I think he might have called other family members of other victims as well. I'm not one hundred percent sure,
but there's just something so nefarious about that. A killer that seems to get off on knowing that you're piling on grief and trauma on top of the grief and trauma that you've already caused.
That would make sense that maybe this person had no intention of ever killing Howard or his children, but just the idea that they would have to live in constant fear, thinking that anytime they receive a package it's going to be booby trapped. That could have been something that added
to the enjoyment for the perpetrator. And I don't know if the perpetrator intended for this to happen, but it also kind of made the police suspicious of Howard, wondering if he orchestrated the whole thing and wrote the note to make it look like he was being targeted because they thought it was a bit convenient at first that he just happened to arrive at home at the moment that the gun went off so that he could discover his wife's body. They think maybe he orchestrated this in
order to fabricate an alibi for himself. They never found any evidence against him, and as far as anyone can tell, there were no problems in their marriage, no motive he
would have had to murder his wife. Howard was described as being very cooperative with investigators, but he began to lose his temper, and his breaking point is when they decided that they were going to take his daughter, Doreen in for questioning on the same day as Joan's funeral, As they literally showed up in the cemetery to pick her up and bring her to the station for questioning right after the funeral ended, and that really rubbed power the wrong way.
Yeah, the way that the family retreated, especially to children, and the timing of all this is yucky, But given the time period, I don't think the way that law enforcement was trained to deal with the children of murder victims or families in general, is what it is today. So when we're looking through the lens of twenty twenty five, we're going to look back at the eighties and be
absolutely shocked at the insensitivity. And I know law enforcement has come a long way since then, there's obviously still room for improvement, and it varies so much between different police departments or sheriff's departments. But I can kind of understand what investigators were working with here in that Statistically speaking, we all know that if someone is murdered, they're likely murdered by somebody close to them, So it would make sense that they would zero in on Howard early on,
especially in the absence of other leads. But I really can't help but wonder with this killer. My gut keeps telling me that there has to be one genuine victim. Was this just subterfuge with pointing to Howard? And was Joan really the victim? I mean, obviously Joan was the victim, But when I say victim, I mean the one target of the killer. Amidst all the victims and then these other people later on are just kind of buried, and that it was like, let's just have a whole bunch
of victims. They're not going to be able to connect me, especially if I go look over there and over there is Howard rather than looking at Joan, and then law enforcement focuses on Howard. And another possibility is that the whole family. Howard joaned the kids. They weren't the targets at all, and he didn't have a grudge against the family. There's just so many possibilities here because we don't have the answers and these cases are still unsolved.
That is a possibility that maybe there wasn't a grudge against anyone at the family, but this family was selected at random. The perpetrator did his research to find out who the children were, and just felt that I'm going to kill one of the victims and I'm going to torment the rest by making them think that I'm going
to come back and harm the others. And also I don't know if this was planned, But now Howard and his family have come under suspicion and the police are extensively interrogating them thinking that they're involved, and that's only
going to add to their trauma. Well, this exact thing what happened to the Sun Craig, because he lived fairly close in New York with his own wife just down the street, and they started wondering if he orchestrated the whole thing, because it turned out that Howard owned a marine engineering business and Craig had been one of his employees, but he apparently had difficulty adjusting to the work there, and they ultimately made the mutual decision that the job
just wasn't for him, and Craig decided to move on. So investigators started wondering if this could have given Craig a potential motive for the crime, that he wanted to get revenge on his father for causing him to lose his job by orchestrating this elaborate scheme to kill his mother in order to frame his father and cause him
a lot of trauma. But Howard did not believe this for a second, maintaining that it was Craig who ultimately made the decision to quit the job and that he was not actually fired, and that it was pretty much mutual. And he also said Craig is very devoted to his mother, He had no hatred animasi, and even if he was angry at me, I don't think he would murder his
own mother just to get back at me. But one of the reasons that the police were suspicious to Craig is that one of the traits of the business is that they would install electrical lines into the boiler rooms of ships, and investigators wondered if this might have given Craig the necessary knowledge to assemble this booby trap device
which killed his mother. But Howard thought that was ridiculous, because he said, one of the reasons we decided that the job wasn't working out is because Craig just did not adapt well to it. He did not have a good time handling the technical side of it. It wasn't
really his thing. He wasn't a barely master of physics, so they really thought that he would not even even have the mechanical wherewithal to assemble a booby trap like this successfully, let alone him not having a real motive to kill his own mother.
So this is really interesting. But I always find the testimony of parents on whether their child could or couldn't have committed a crime not to be the most compelling. I know that they know them very well, but parents always want to see the best in their child, And I don't know if Craig was a master of physics like you said, or how much engineering know how would have been available, but that my son isn't smart enough to do this type of a defense. It doesn't really
land he worked there. I feel like he could have had some knowledge. I'm not saying he did it, but I'm just saying that Howard saying that he didn't do it is giving me kind of Christopher Porko's mom kind of a vibe where he attacked his mother and father with an axe and the mother ended up surviving. She was horribly disfigured. I believe she lost them of her vision from the attack, but she said that she didn't remember anything. She denied that Christopher had anything to do
with it. And so I think that a parent's love for their child can supersede almost anything. They can believe almost anything about their child, or I think convinced themselves of a certain narrative. And I'm not saying at all that's what's happening here, just that we don't know for sure whether or not Craig would be capable.
Yeah, I do remember the Christopher Porco case, how his mother was literally disfigured with an axe, and even though her face was all messed up, she was still defending her son and saying, I have no memory of what happened, so I can't say that he's the man who a guy who attacked me. But I know he's not capable of this, even though the evidence against him was overwhelming. But yeah, you're right, children do have blind spots towards their kids. But this is one where I don't really
see much in the way of evidence against Craig. It's almost like the police had no other angles to go on, no other leads, so they just started focusing on the family. But once you learn the circumstances of how Craig got arrested,
you're kind of going to roll your eyes. I think it would be in August of that year, three months before the incident, when the New York Police Department and the United States Postal Inspection Service had done a three month investigation and Craig was finally arrested on the federal charge of quote unquote mailing injurious articles, which is a crime which carried a penalty of life imprisonment if it led to someone being killed. But the evidence against him
was pretty weak. It might have seen impressive at the time, but nowadays we note that this has led to a number of wrongful convictions. A handwriting analyst concluded that the writing on the threatening note inside the cookbook was similar to Craig's handwriting, and the other piece of evidence was that a police sniffer dog took Craig's scent after sniffing one of his socks and subsequently detected the same scent
on the internal mechanism of the zip gun. I mean, if there was additional corroborating evidence, then this might seem like a strong case. But now we know, after forty years of perspective, that handwriting analysts and sniffer dogs are not exactly the most reliable evidence.
No, you're absolutely correct. I think given the time period, we put a lot of faith into these types of pseudoscience, whether it be bitemark evidence, is blood spatter evidence, sniffer dog evidence. It was kind of the era of forensic files, and with the rise of DNA, we saw the rise of things like handwriting analysis. And one of the scariest things is that, I think, as a public who weren't as educated on true crime and the science behind it as we are today, we just assumed that guilt was
a foregone conclusion. When we saw this evidence show up or one of these experts testify at a trial. And that's not to say that all bitemark evidence, sniffer dog evidence, handwriting analysis, anything that you can kind of put into that bin is wrong all of the time. I think it really depends upon who is the one who is
analyzing and interpreting. But when we have a human being analyzing and interpreting, there's room for error, and especially when we don't have standardized practices across different states, like I know we don't with sniffer dogs. I'm sure that there isn't with things like handwriting in analysis. I think there's different schools of thought, so it leaves a lot of room for error. The difference with DNA, which is considered a hard science is it's pretty objectively obvious. It either
is or it isn't. There isn't room for interpretation in the same type of a way.
Yeah, pretty much. And this was before DNA testing, And now that you mention that, I don't know if any DNA testing has ever been done on the box or any of the evidence from this case. I'd be interested to see if investigators could revisit it to see if they could get any DNA off it today, but obviously back in nineteen eighty two they wouldn't be thinking of that.
But following his arrest, Craig was immediately released on a three hundred thousand dollars bail, which was put up by his father, who continued to maintain that his son had
nothing to do with his mother's murder. But he would be out for nearly a year, but in June of nineteen eighty three, the charges against him were finally dropped, and a surprise, surprise, it turned out that the credibility of the sniffer dogs handler have been called into question, and they also did some subsequent analysis from other handwriting experts and they couldn't say with absolute certainty that Craig's handwriting and the note from the cookbook where a definitive match.
So the police continue to maintain that, yes, we believe Craig is guilty, but we did not feel that the evidence was sufficient enough to bring him to trial and secure a conviction. So that's why they decided to drop the charges. But they did say that they had not cleared out Craig as a suspect, but he subsequently moved
to Connecticut. Howard also got remarried and moved out of the state as well, and the case pretty much faded from the spotlight, and the police pretty much had the mentality that, yes, we think Craig did this, but without any additional evidence, there's nothing else we can do.
I guess they just didn't have any other good suspects and this was the first crime. This was the first murder. I don't know what ends up happening until you share those details, but investigators are looking at it, and it's pretty easy to look within the family and super east to get tunnel vision. When there's no other good suspects around, then I think investigators will definitely focus on the family.
And I think now when investigators are trained, they're likely taught not to do these things, because we're looking back in retrospect at cases from the eighties and earlier than that, and we see these egregious errors, and we have the benefit of having the perspective of time, and so I'm not criticizing police work at the time. They did the best with what they had, but it just didn't always go the way that it should by our current perspective.
But I can also see why investigators did focus on Craig. He had some things in his background, and it looked like he might have the engineering know how. And it seems clear that they saw the snufferdog evidence as being
really solid evidence given the time period. And like I mentioned before, it's one of those things where it really depends upon the handler, and it depends upon the training of the dog, and so it just isn't enough to have it be the main thing that you're looking at as evidence, and to bring an actual case to trial with sniffer dog evidence. Now from where we're sitting, it just seems so wild to me.
Yeah, exactly like we've seen countless wrongful conviction cases where people have been sent to prison on stuff like bitemark evidence, handwriting analysis, and sniffer dog evidence, and it seemed pretty solid at the time back in the seventies or eighties, but then years after the fact they do something stronger like DNA profiling and find out that it doesn't match the defendant and he winds up getting his conviction overturned
and released from prison. And I have a feeling that if Craig had gone to trial and been convicted on this evidence, it may not have held up in the long run, and he may have had his conviction overturned at a later date. So yeah, I can see why at the time Craig would have seen like the prime
suspect in the police eyes. But when you realize that this was the only evidence they had, you realize that they're just asn't much there, and they don't even have a real compelling motive other than the fact that ooh, maybe he wanted to kill his mother as revenge against his father for them making a mutual decision for him to leave his job.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and make an assumption. I'm going to guess given the time period, even though there was limited media, there wasn't the Internet, I would still think that there would be a level of public involvement that would rarely be seen. Just because the nature of the crime is so unique, and because a lot of the elements of the crime
are very unique. It would make for front page news, and so I would think that the police would be feeling a large degree of pressure from the public, as would the district attorney, that they would want to have somebody pay for this.
Oh yeah, especially since it's a crime where anyone could be harmed, where if other people start receiving packages or going to be a lot of stress there saying if I open something, is there going to be a booby trapped gun that fires at me. And they had that same pressure with the tailand all murders which took place around the same time period where they actually had to recall Thailand all from the shelf everywhere because everyone was paranoid that they would get poisoned if they purchased the
wrong pills. So yeah, I'm sure there was immense pressure to solve this, and they thought that Craig seemed like the most logical suspect and felt like we have to get a conviction on it to make this go away. But here's where it gets really weird, because it would be an entire decade later in nineteen ninety three when the zip gun bomber struck again, and this time the victim was a retired sixty eight year old sanitation worker named Anthony Lenza and his sixty seven year old wife,
Connie Lenza. On October the fifteenth in nineteen ninety three, they decided to leave the residence in Staten Island in order to go stay at their vacation home in Shehola, Pennsylvania, and a couple days later, the couple's killed and grandchildren decided to pay them a visit, and they had picked up Anthony and Connie's mail from the residence in New
York and brought it with them. And one of these pieces of males was a package that Anthony opened and he found a blue velvet coin box with a commemorative medallion inside. But when Anthony opened the box, it turned out to be booby trapped with the homemade zip gun device which went off and fired three bullets, and this time that one of them struck Anthony, Connie, and their eleven year old granddaughter, Liza, and while they were all left with minor injuries, thankfully none of the wounds were
fatal and they wound up surviving. But the moment they looked at this device, they realized, Wow, this is exactly the same as the zip gun booby trap that was used to kill Joan Kip eleven years earlier.
I guess you could look at it two ways that either they're incredibly lucky that not everybody that received this ended up dying, or you could look at it as they're unlucky that they ended up being the victims of this crime, and in the case of Joan, obviously it ended her life, which is so incredibly unfortunate. But one thing that I'm really curious about is if there was any type of signature in this zip gun slash bomb. I know they're calling it a bomb, but it's not
really a bomb. It's just a rigged gun. But was there some kind of signature in the process of making it that would tie it back to the same individual pretty much?
Yeah, Like they said that they were very specific and there were no other documented cases of anyone receiving a zipgun device like this through the mail, so they said they were absolutely certain that this was the same person
who had sent these two packages. But of course that really complicated things because by this point Craig Kip had moved on to another state, was living a new life, and I can understand him maybe deciding to send a copycat if he wanted to take suspicion off himself to make it look like there was some other Matt bomber
out there sending off these devices to people. But this was eleven years after the fact, and Craig didn't seem to be any danger of being charged with the crime, and he was living in another state, so it makes no sense for him to send off another copycat device to a random person in order to make himself look more innocent. They looked into potential connections between the lens Of family and the Kit family, but they found nothing. It was just two completely random, unrelated victims.
Yeah, no one's going to be able to convince me in this situation that Craig somehow he just lay in wait for what eleven years in order to do this to what prove his innocence, and nobody's putting a finger at him anymore. He's moved on with his life. What would be his motivation in doing this If it was like three years after the fact, I could believe that it would be fresh enough that maybe he would want
to misdirect. But I just don't believe that Craig had anything to do with it, and that this eleven year mark would be the time where he would go, oh, let's point the finger at somebody else. It just doesn't add up. So if it isn't Craig, we're left with a few options. Either the killer killed once and Joan was his primary target, and maybe something stressful happened in his life, you know, the end of a relationship, death of a loved one, A moved something to that effect
and it caused him to ramp up again. Or perhaps the individual was in a partnership to begin with with somebody else it was done together, or perhaps they taught somebody how to do it along the way, and then that person continued on their legacy. And then there's the final option where it could be a complete copycat, but that seems less likely because of the precision needed to make this type of a weapon, the zip gun bomb, which wouldn't have been readily available in the nineteen eighties.
Oh yeah, exactly, because even though the murder of Joan Kip got extensive media coverage back at eighty two and eighty three, it had been out at the spotlight for a long long time. And it's not like you could just go online and look up other crimes about zip gun bombs. You would have to do extensive research. There are documented cases of people doing like copycat crimes to
further their own agenda. I know that in the late nineteen eighties there was a woman named Stella Nicol who decided to kill her husband for the insurance money, and because the Thailand all murders had been in the news for a while, she decided to do her own copycat where she gave her husband a poisoned tail in all capsule or sorry etcan capsule, and then she decided to put some tainted capsules on the shelf so that another random woman bought it, took the etc. And died of
poisoning as well. So the police initially thought that it was the tailand all murderer. It was a copycat, but they didn't realize that. They eventually realized that Stella Nicol just tried to kill an innocent person to create a diversion to cover up the fact that she had murdered
her own husband for the insurance money. So I could see someone doing that, but once again, like a copycat, seems unlikely because it's been eleven years, the originals zip gun bombing hasn't been in the news for quite some time, and like you said, it's such a specific device that it would be very difficult for a copycat to do it unless they had the blueprints of the original device. And of course there was nothing about Anthony Lenza or
his wife that stuck out. They didn't seem to have any known enemies, So if someone wanted to do a copycat crime, why did they target this harmless, elderly couple.
So I always wonder, and not the stereotype, but maybe it's from watching The Sopranos that when I hear retired sanitation worker in the context of a murder, not a murder specifically in this case, but a murder in a general sense of the pattern, and we tie it back to Joan Kiff's murder, it makes me wonder if there's any mob connection.
Yeah. Yeah, I wondered that myself. Hmm, was this just a cover? Did Anthony Lenza have some enemies in his background he wanted to do this? But I don't think the mob would have the wherewithal to send a booby trap package containing a zip gun.
I don't really think bringing a zip gun device and sending it to an individual is the mo of the mob. If they're going to send a message, it seems to be to a particular person and not to the public at large, which this very much did, which would bring heat to the mob. So it just doesn't really strike me as mob related.
No, definitely not so. The next incident took place several months later, on April fifth, nineteen ninety four, and this time the victim was Alice Caswell, a seventy five year old widow living in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn.
She received a package which was postmarked from Brooklyn and also contained a blue velvet coin box with a medallion out of it, and once again the box was booby trapped with the homemade zipgun device, and when Alice opened it, the device fired off some more bullets and she was struck in the abdomen and left critically injured, but she was able to make it to a neighbors in order to summon medical attention, and she wound up getting help
and surviving the ordeal. But the weird thing about this crime is that the package had actually been addressed to Alice's sixty one year old brother, Richard McGarrell, who was a retired US Customs agent who worked at Newark Airport. But while Richard had previously lived at the same address with Alice, he had actually moved out fifteen years earlier
and was now living in a retirement home. And once again they couldn't find anyone in Alice or Richard's background who would have had a motive to do something like this. They didn't seem to have any known enemies, and the fact that it was addressed to someone who hadn't lived it at that address to fifteen years makes me wonder was this person accessing public records and just got some very outdated information and as a result, they sent a package to someone who no longer resided there.
I love that Alice is just going right in and opening up her brother's mail. It makes me like her. I'm not suggesting anybody go and commit felonies, but there's likely something to it. Maybe she has power of attorney because he's sixty one years old in a retirement facility, so that may speak to an illness or some type of cognitive decline, and she is the responsible party who's taking care of his affairs while he's in that facility. I'm not sure, but it's just unfortunate for Alice that
she opened that up. It was addressed to her brother and this happened, but really fortunate that she ended up escaping with her life.
Yeah. I don't know any specific details, but I have the feeling that he probably couldn't take care of himself and that she probably would be handling his mail no matter what. So it was shortly after this when they launched a new investigation, which involved the New York City Police Department, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They put together a task force, and one month after the incident with Alice Caswell, they actually found someone who seemed like a promising suspect.
He was a fifty four year old US customs officer named Louis Sapola, and the reason he popped up on the radar is because of an incident where he decided to go to the village of Verplank and throw a hand grenade at a residence belonging to a newspaper publisher that Sepola had once worked for, but thankfully, no one was harmed when the grenade went off. But when they checked Sepola's residence, they turned up a workshop containing bomb making equipment, as well as a number of newspaper clippings
about the attack on Alice Caswell. So they started wondering could this guy be the zipgun bomber? Because he also happened to work as a customs officer. Like Richard McGarrell, he had once worked at Newark Airport, though they never found any evidence that Richard and Sepola knew each other.
He was convicted of various felonies in relation to the hand grenade incident and received a prison sense of eight and a half to twenty five years, but in the end they never found any evidence to conclusively link them to the zip gun incidents. And the problem is that the zip gun incidents would continue after Sepola was already in prisons, so after that he didn't suddenly didn't seem like such a strong suspect.
This is absolutely wild, seems like such a good suspect. Investigators must have been like, Okay, this guy's got all these bomb making materials, he's obviously got the engineering know how, and maybe we can't get him on this crime specifically, but we've got him on something else. And so when he's behind bars, one would expect that these attacks would stop. But when they don't, he must have confounded the investigators, going, who is doing this? We thought that we had our guy.
Yeah, And at the outset, I thought that Suppola seemed like a promising suspect. But then I heard about the hand grenade incident and how brazen that was, and I'm thinking that doesn't fit the same moo, because the zipgun bomber is this cold calculated guy, this patient guy, who constructs these intricate devices and then mails them to people. And I'm thinking, if he really had a grudge against this newspaper publisher, why didn't he just mail him a
zip gun? Like why did he just flat out throw a hand grenade, which is not a subtle thing to do. So it might have just been a red herring, the fact that he had these newspaper clings about the previous zip Coome bombings, because maybe he was just interested in them, And other than the fact that he happened to work as a customs officer at the same airport as Richard McGarrell, there wasn't anything to link them with any of the
other victims. So in retrospect, it seems unlikely that he was the person responsible.
Yeah, I think you're right. It's obviously Supola couldn't have done it. It's possible that he was part of a partnership or that taught somebody, or somebody taught him later.
There's a bunch of different possibilities that make it, I guess plausible that even though we know that he throws a hand grenade and is chaotic with the way that he behaves and disorganized, it doesn't really speak to the cold, methodical, casually cruel nature of the original zip gun bomber who targeted Joan, because that takes somebody who's going to plan and who's going to design and execute something that hasn't
been seen in this context before. So there's somebody that wants to innovate and they want to they want maybe the notoriety, but they're willing to be in the sidelines enough so that they don't reveal too much about themselves. But one interesting thing about these cases is Joan was
of I think fifty five. Maybe confirmer deny that if I'm wrong, when she was targeted and these victims, although I think ten years has passed, eleven years has passed, and they've got about eleven years older, just give or take you know, five years. So is it because there's a certain demographic that this individual likes, and so as he ages the demographic ages as well. I just find that if it was completely random. The likelihood of it all being people who are fifty five plus seems unlikely.
Yeah, it is true. We know that, like all the packages in this story were addressed to older people. I mean, the youngest person was Joan Kip, who was fifty four years old. And in our next one we're going to talk about, we're going to have a person who opens the package is only eighteen years old. But it's a package that was addressed to an older person. But you look at all the people whose names are on all
these labels, they are older person. So it makes you wonder was it just someone that was their mo They had a grudge against elderly people and then just decided to select them, maybe because they knew that elderly people might be more prone to open up strange packages without the foresight to check and thinking, Hm, why am I getting this package from a person? I don't know. But in all the cases it did work because they did open the gun, open the package and caused the gun
to go off. But other than that, they've never been able to find any connections between any of these victims. That about brings an end to part one of our series about the zip gun Bombers, so join us next week for part two.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the trail like cold Patreon?
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon if you join our five dollars tier Tier two. We also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier free,
the ten dollar tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of UNSAWD Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jules and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series and we're really enjoying doing those. So we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and Chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy