Welcome to part two of our series about the zipgun bombers. So let's jump right in. So the next incident would take place on June the twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five, and the victim, like I just said, was only eighteen years old. Her name was Stephanie Gaffney and she happened to be living in her grandparents' residence in Queen's and was eight and a half months pregnant at that time.
So that day, Stephanie was talking on the phone while looking through her grandparents mail, and she came across a package which was postmarked from Manhattan and was addressed to Gilmore or Occupant, which happened to be the surname of her grandparents. It was an ad for a company which offered a health insurance plan. And you're gonna love this. Stephanie just decides to open her grandparents mail without permission.
But she's eighteen years old, I guess she's immature. And she wound up finding a blue hardcover book inside, and when she opened it, it had a homemade zip gun device go off, and shrapnel actually wound up burning Stephanie on her abdomen, chest and legs and even though she was not seriously injured, the incident actually caused some distress with her unborn child, so the doctors had to take her to the hospital and induce labor earlier than scheduled.
But thankfully, as Stephanie did give birth to a healthy baby girl who was not harmed by the last She was pretty lucky because she had been talking on the phone when she opened up the book and was a bit distracted and was holding it at a slight angle away from her, and that likely prevented the bullets from directly striking her and probably saved the life of herself and her child.
That is so horrifying to think that as Stephanie was paying attention, she wasn't talking on the phone, and she held it at a slightly different angle, that the results could have been very different for her and for her unborn child. So it's such a blessing that she was distracted in that moment. But I can't imagine the type of trauma that would be inflicted upon Stephanie, not just because of what she experienced, but the danger that her child was in.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what ultimately happened to Stephanie and her baby girl who would now be thirty. So that really makes me feel old thinking that this took place thirty years ago. But hopefully they went out and have good lives, though I'm thinking Stephanie probably felt I am never opening my grandparents mail again after this incident. Once again, they could not find any reason why the package was sent to this particular place, and unlike the others,
it didn't have a full name. It just said Gilmore or occupant. What was interesting is that Stephanie's grandfather and her uncle were both retired police officers, and a couple of years before that, her uncle had actually broken up a Dominican drug gang as part of a major drug bust. But they looked into that angle couldn't find anything from either man's careers to suggest that the zip gun bombing
had made them specific targets. So once again, it just seemed like this place was selected completely at random, and that even if one of her grandparents was the intended target, Stephanie was just the unlucky person who happened to open
the package and got injured. But it just added more perplexing questions to the whole thing, because at this point, the person that police thought was their prime suspect, Louis Sippola was now in jail, and now these packages are still being sent out, so they just don't know what to make of the whole thing.
So after the first incident, we had roughly a decade cooling off period if we're to assume this is the same person. And then with these three incidents, how close in time were they? Will you refresh my memory.
Within a year and a half of each other. The first one was in October of nineteen ninety three, the next one is April and nineteen ninety four, and this is June of nineteen ninety five.
That's really interesting with the timeline. It makes me wonder is the offender ramping up or like we've spoken about fairly extensively in Part one, that there's a possibility that there is a real victim hidden in there and the other ones are subterfuge and that's what we're witnessing. But if that is true and that is the case, the question then becomes, how do you find the other random victims?
Given the time period we spoke about it, it was the eighties when Jones murder first happened, and now it's the nineties, so yes, there is the Internet, but it isn't what it is today, the ability to find people's
addresses and phone numbers. It's kind of rudimentary compared to how it would be as far as like looking at people's social media profiles today, I would think that you would use something like the phone book, because that would have been the central location for most of the citizens in your area.
I mean, it is possible that maybe, like the first few victims, were just chosen at random as a distraction, and that their actual target was someone buried in the middle of this. I mean, some of these it appears that there wasn't much research plan because obviously, since this one was addressed to Gilmore or occupant and didn't have a full name, that indicates that they didn't know too
much about this family. And of course we already mentioned that the previous one was for Richard McGarrell, who hadn't lived at that address in years, So makes me think that this person did not have much knowledge of this family. But they looked into the backgrounds of all these victims and just couldnot find anything like any known enemies they had who would have had a motive to do this,
And that's why investigators were left so perplexed. But the last victim was seventy seven year old retired real estate agent named Richard Basil who lived in the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn, and on June the twentieth, nineteen ninety six, he received a package which was addressed to his wife, Marietta and had a return address from the charity March of New York, though it was postmarked from elsewhere, and this time around there wasn't actually a book in there.
There was actually a video cassette inside the package, but when the cassette's container was opened, he had another booby trapped zipgun device went off and fired three bullets, but because Richard opened the box at an odd angle from a distance, he actually escaped injury as all of the bullets just wound up shattering the window and none of them struck him, so thankfully, this was an incident in which Nolan was hurt. But once again, Richard Basil had
no connection to the other victims. He did not have any known enemies, anything in his background which would have made him a target, so it just seemed like another elderly guy who seemed to be selected completely at random, but.
The one commonality seems to be that everybody's over the age of fifty four.
Correct pretty much.
Yeah, well except for Stephanie, but she was the unintended victim. The package was addressed to her grandmother's so obviously the killer wasn't targeting eighteen year old Stephanie. In my opinion, something about the age range or the demographic feels really calculated. It just seems unlikely or improbable that if you were truly choosing victims at random, that you would have all of your victims within a similar age demographic.
Yeah, so it makes me wonder where they were getting that information. And it is also interesting that Joan Kip was the only person who was killed. I know, it was just luck that none of these other victims were killed, but it makes me wonder if the offender just started escalating, like they got frustrated that they're like poking up all these booby trapped devices, yet none of them are fatal. They're only wounding up injured or not being struck by
bullets at all. And that's why they kept sending off the packages in such a quicker succession, because they wanted to kill someone else. Yet they couldn't succeed each time, so that's why they had to keep repeating themselves.
I really would like to know more about the March of Dime's angle, because if you were involved in a charity at the time, wouldn't it be pretty easy to get a hold of people's personal information.
That is possible. It's never been specified if the Basils were part of the March of Dimes New York. I know that Richard was the one who opened the package, but it technically was addressed to his wife, Marietta, So maybe Marietta donated to them at some point, and maybe that's the reason Richard wasn't suspicious, thinking, oh, my wife gets packages from this charity all the time, so I'm
going to open it without a second thought. So after this, the case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and that's how I originally heard about it. And after that there were no more incidents involving these suspicious packages. So maybe the fact that it was now getting exposure on national television finally scared the perpetrator off and finally convinced them to stop. But you may have noticed that there are no actual
bombs connected to this. But I think The reason that they wanted to call him the zip gun bomber was because this was the era where the Unibomber was all over the news when he was finally identified as Ted Kaczinski and arrested. So of course this was all sensation thinking if we use the word bomber, this is going to get a lot more press, and it's going to get a lot more attention. So that's why they decided to give him this nickname, even though he technically only
used zip guns and never actually used any bombs. But this was the only serial mail bombing case who have ever occurred in the history of New York City, and it is still unprecedented, as I don't think there have been any other documented cases in the history of the country where people have received packages with a booby trapped zipgun that fires off bullets.
I've never heard of anything similar to this, But in all fairness, I was unfamiliar with this case, so I definitely don't know it all. I find it interesting that they would call him a bomber. I guess it comes down to your trying to sell papers. You want eyeballs on the story and what is more compelling, Like you said in the era of Ted Kaczinski than calling him the zipgun bomber. It does have a bit of a ring to it rather than like the zipgun package guy.
It reminds me a little bit of the stage ha panic cases from the eighties, where it was like one seemed to build on the next, and it just created this kind of frenzy that sold a ton of papers and had a lot of eyeballs on a lot of news segments.
Pretty much. Yeah, and now I want to talk about like how the unibomber might have influenced this offender and maybe paused him to come out of the spotlight again in the nineteen nineties, because that's when the unibomber was getting all this attention. I don't know if this is just a coincidence, but there was actually a unibomber explosion on May the fifth, nineteen eighty two, two days before
Joan Kip received her package. It took place in Nashville, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt University, where a secretary named Janet Smith was seriously injured by a mail bomb when she opened a package which been addressed to a computer science professor at the university. And of course the murder of Joan Kip took place two days later, and I still wonder could someone have read about this story in the newspaper and it gave them the inspiration to send this package to Joe.
But even though the Unibomber had been wanted since the late nineteen seventies, he actually went through a six year hiatus in which there were no bombing incidents until there were two separate mail bomb attacks which took place on opposite sides of the country on June the twenty second and June the twenty fourth and of nineteen ninety three.
And then lo and behold, after the Unibomber is thrust back into the spotlight in the media, the zipgun Bomber makes his big return and sends a package to Anthony Lenza less than four months later in October. So it makes me wonder if the zipgun Bomber, after this decade long hiatus, read about the Unibomber getting this attention and then decided, I'm going to go into action again, and I'm going to send my own special device to people and hopefully maybe get some of the Unibomber's headlines.
If that's true, and it is, the same killer, then it definitely speaks to somebody who really cares what the public things and wants to have this fearsome reputation a la BTK. I think if we look even at the method that the zipgun bomber chose, that speaks to somebody who wants notoriety. If you wanted something quiet, you could just poison somebody. You could do it in a way
that wouldn't call such attention with the press. But when you're orchestrating attacks like these, you're doing multiple attacks, and they're so intricate, so calculated, seemingly random, and you're using this carefully constructed zip gun device, you're putting it in like this blue velvet coin box in some cases in the cooking in the cookbook for Joan, it just speaks to somebody who really is thinking, how will my crimes
be perceived? And it also speaks to somebody who wants their crimes to be tied together.
Yeah, that would totally make sense to me that he was seeing all this attention that the unibomber was getting, and then even though the zip gun bomber had gotten away with it for over a decade. I just think that like the BTK. They just couldn't stand the thought of not getting any more attention and not being in the papers, so they had to do something in order
to get themselves back into the spotlight again. And it's interesting how the Unibomber, one of his later bombs, took place on April the twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, and then the Zip gun bomber's attack on Stephanie Gaffney took place just two months later on June the twenty seventh. Ted Kaczinski was arrested in April of nineteen ninety six, and then the package sent off to Richard Basil took place in June of nineteen ninety six, so only two
months later. So maybe they're thinking of themselves. Kazinski's been caught, he's in custody. Maybe I'll be the new big boy now, the new unidentified bomber getting all the attention. But ironically enough, after the Richard Basil thing, after he finally got the nickname Zip gun Bomber, he pretty much faded from the spotlight.
So it makes you wonder did something happen to him, Did he die or go to prison for another crime, or did he just get paranoid that he was going to get caught and then bring everything to a stop. So it would not be until May of two thousand and two, around the twenty year anniversary of Joan Kipp's death, that the New York Daily News published an article in which they reported that two men from Brooklyn who had once been roommates were being looked at as potential suspects.
The name of one of these men has never been released publicly. He has only been described as an ex con and a former roommate of the person I'm going to talk about now. But the other man was identified as a forty eight year old Stephen Wavra who had a history of strange criminal behavior during the early nineteen seventies.
Warbra had served in the Navy, but was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenica, and he had history of run ins with the law for such offenses as making bomb threats against postal facilities, and there were even two separate occasions where Warbra was caught carrying hollowed out books even though they did not contain any guns or bombs or anything. But he just had a history of very irrational behavior.
There was one incident where he got into an altercation outside Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where just one month earlier he had been released from prison on robbery charges, when he suddenly decided to throw black pepper into the eyes of a female MP who was guarding the main gate at Fort Hamilton, an attacker of the crowbar, and when another MP attempted to intervene, Wabrah attacked him as well, and he had to be chased down and restrained by
three soldiers before he was arrested. And when asked why he did this, Wabra said that he wanted to steal the forty five caliber handguns that the MPs were carrying because he was only carrying a twenty two caliber weapon and he didn't feel it was intimidated enough, so he had to steal some bigger guns and that was his loan motive for this crime.
This is just a really bizarre motive. He sounds like a pretty odd guy, but it really is the hollowed out books. For me, I don't know how common it would be for somebody to be carrying around hollowed out books. Is this like a spy thing that he read in the spy magazine and he just started doing it or is this something that is highly specific to him?
Yeah, I mean it's just such a specific thing that you have to wonder could he have had expertise in
making these type of booby traps. Yeah. The first time he was caught with the hollowed out book was in nineteen eighty three when police visited Wabra and his roommate at their apartment to investigate an unrelated case, and they noticed that he had a hollowed out book and some bomb making equipment on the kitchen table, and Wabra admitted that he was planning to use it on a military base, but he denied ever having sent a device through the mail. And of course he would go to jail for a
few years for having this illegal equipment. Now, obviously they should have raised some red flags because Wabra also lived in New York. We had just had an incident involving a hallowed out book used to kill a woman. But by nineteen eighty three they had already charged Craig Kip and they had still not decided whether or not they were going to take him to trial. So I think in the police's eyes they were thinking that, oh, well, we already got our mand for Joan Kipp's murder, so
obviously this hollow out book must be a coincidence. So I think that means that Wabra was not properly investigated at the time because they thought they had already found their suspect.
There's a really strange dichotomy here because on one hand, Wabra sounds like such a great suspect, but when we look at our suspect, we think somebody who's like cold, calculated, methodical, but he seems really hot headed. But then when you go back to the books being hollowed out, that is so specific and almost impossible to ignore.
It is. Yes, and as we're going to find out, there actually is a personal connection between Wabra and Joan Kip, even though it's a very very loose one. And it turned out that Joan had actually been Wabra's guidance counselor
when he was attending junior high school. But it's kind of a weak connection because this would have been something like fifteen to twenty years before the Zip gone bombing, so I'm not even sure he would have remembered her or would have had a motive to select her to harm her, and the reason he wasn't looked at it a serious suspect at first is because he was actually in jail for another crime at the time the hollowed
out book was sent to Joan Kip's address. But like I mentioned earlier, the police said that they suspected two people may have been involved, and that possibly he was getting his roommate to mail mysterious packages on his behalf while he was incarcerated. So even though we don't have many details about the roommate, it's possible that if Wabra assembled the bomb and then went to jail, the roommate still could have mailed it to Joan on his behalf.
That's really interesting and it makes me wonder if Joan Kip was indeed an intended victim, or if there is a more cold, methodical person who's partnered with Wavra, and maybe they had the foresight not to want to be tied to any of these crimes, and so they asked Wavra to pick somebody at random, and maybe he thought, oh, this person, Joan Kip, she's far enough removed from me, nobody's going to tie us together, rather than just picking a truly random victim. And because we see similar devices.
We know that these crimes are connected to Joan Kipps, but it could be a different individual doing it because we know that it can't be Wavra. He's locked up, and the blue velvet box is different than the hollowed out book, which maybe was Wavra's signature pretty much.
Yeah, like the first one with Joan Kip was a cookbook, but the ones that were sent off to Anthony Lenza and Richard McGarrell, those were in the medallion boxes, the blue velvet boxes, which were so specific that you have to think they were done by the same person. So I do think that it's a pretty weak motive to think that Wabra may have decided to target Joan Kipp because she had been his guidance counselor because that was
so many years earlier. But it is kind of more interesting when you think that Joan made all those cryptoc remarks where she said, quote there will be others, and she wanted people to notify the school district and all the other educators to warn them about what was happening, which gave off the oppression she have had some suspicions about someone that deliberately targeted her and sent her the
zip gun bomb. So it makes me wonder if she had gotten an opportunity to be questioned about Stephen Wabra, I'd be curious to see if she would have said anything, like maybe she remembered something from her background that maybe he had a history of using hauled out books or building bombs or something when he was in junior high school and she thought he was disturbing kid, or maybe he had resurfaced recently to make threats against her or something,
and that's why she suspected that he could have been the one who sent it out. It does seem like a weak connection, but I still wonder if Joan had her own ideas about Stephen Wabra.
Yeah, it definitely does seem like a weak connection, But I guess if you look at it one way, you could say that things had happened to us during our formative years childhood, high school are deeply impactful, and perhaps or maybe he perceived the way that she treated him to be that like he was less than Maybe they had a positive interaction and rather than come up with a truly random victim, Wavra, when potentially asked by his partner to come up with somebody he came up with
Joan Kip and just assumed that investigators would never catch them, so they would never catch the connection because it was so many years in the past that there was any connection that would tie the two of them together.
We've already seen him do irrational things like throwing pepper in like the eyes of an MP because they just wanted to steal her gun. So it could have been just this long standing grudge that he hung on to for over fifteen years or something. And even if Joan didn't even remember him, he still could have remembered her
and then just decided to target her at random. And no connections have been found between Wavra or any the other victims from the nineties, so that could have just been his mo where he'll just pick people at random
and then just decide to mail them packages. Wavra was out of prison for the first three incidents, which took place during the nineties, but in April of nineteen ninety six, he was arrested inside the Brooklyn Public Library for possessing a hull out book containing exact oblades, and he also happened to be carrying twenty two caliber rifle shells and as a convicted Fellon, Warbar was forbidden from possessing ammunitions such as that, so he wound up receiving a ninety
month since at the Beaumont Federal Prison Complex in Texas. The Zipgon bomb that was sent to Richard Basil a couple months later, Warbar would have been in prison for that, But once again, he still has the connection with his roommate. I do not believe they were still roommates in nineteen ninety six, but they were still friends. They were still
in touch with each other. So theoretically, if Warbar was responsible for the other bombs, he could have had his roommate mail the one to Richard Basil on his behalf after he was already sent to prison.
Definitely, anything is possible, especially when you have multiple offenders that are connected to the same prime.
Yeah, it's kind of why I wish we had more information on the roommate to know if he had a
history of making devices like that. I'm guessing that the reason that they maybe haven't named him PUBB is because he has never been convicted of any of these serious crimes involving weapons, even though he apparently does have a criminal history, so they just don't feel comfortable enough to say his name publicly, whereas Wabra has been in and out at prison and has a history of erratic behavior, they were a lot more comfortable using his name in the newspapers.
And I think that makes a lot of sense in most cases, where you have somebody and if you tie them to this crime without a lot of evidence to substantiate it, it could greatly prejudice things like their future
job opportunities, their future partners. So unless there is a lot of evidence and you're going to bring somebody to trial, I don't really think it's the best thing to be releasing their names and then being like, oh sorry, just kidding, like you aren't actually the guilty party, because a lot of people will have formed their opinions about that person already, and I'm not sure specifically hear how much evidence they did or they didn't have about the roommate. But of
course he's going to look like a compelling suspect. He lives with Wavra, he's got some criminality in his background, but I don't know how close it's tied to what happened here, or how good of a suspect he truly was. For me personally, given what we know thus far about Wavra and the fact that he had a roommate, it seems likely to me or probable that there would be two people involved here, just because we have Wabra locked up and it's not possible that he could have committed
the other three attacks. So I think that there are definitely two people involved. And so I can see why investigators were looking very closely at the roommate.
It would yeah, and it would explain like how these packages were still being sent out when Wabar was in prison. In that aforementioned New York Daily News article from two thousand and two, it contained an interview with a retired detective who worked on the case named John Tarangello, and he made this very weird statement. I'm not sure what to make of it. Quote. It always came back to
the two of them consistently. There was always a common denominator between them and the victims, whether it was the pharmacy, the neighborhood, the hollowed out cookbook. There was a record of Wavra's pal and the computer of each of the victims local pharmacies. We can never figure it out end quote. So I really wish I got more context on the pharmacies thing, because does this mean that this roommate had his name and like all these different pharmacies that all
the victims went to. Because if so, that's a hell of a coincidence, and it makes me wonder, like why a person would need to go to that many different pharmacies. And it also makes me wonder, is this where they were obtaining all the information about the victims? Did they just maybe follow them to a pharmacy, maybe get an address off a prescription on a shelf in the background, and then select them at random. Really makes me wonder, like what the context of this quote is.
Yeah, this is really bizarre. Anytime I hear somebody going to multiple pharmacies, I always think of people doctor shopping for drugs. It also makes you question what type of security measures were there in place in order to protect the patient's information or was it just really easy to access back then because it was really during the advent of like computers and technology, so maybe things were just kept in file folders.
Yeah, so that's maybe what he was doing, But I think about some of the outdated information. The fact that one of the packages was addressed to Richard McGarrell, who
was no longer hadn't lived there for fifteen years. It makes me wonder if maybe Wavru and his roommate like snuck into a pharmacy and saw some database which had an outdated address for Richard McGarrell that was several years old, and then just said, oh, this person sounds like an interesting target and sent a package there and not realizing that Richard was no longer at that address, or it could explain why when the package was sent to Stephanie Gaffney,
the front of the package just simply said Gilmore or occupant. Like maybe they saw the name Gilmore and an address on like a pharmacy prescription or something like that, and then just picked that even though they did not know the name of the person who lived there. So it sounds like they have a little pieces of the puzzle together involving Wabber in the room make but they just can't put everything together or figure out enough evidence in order to make an arrest for either of them.
Yeah, and like we just talked about the likelihood of there being a database where all of these names were available and then searched, and that's how the victims were picked seems unlikely given the time period, But if it was file folders, it makes you wonder did the zip gun bomber attack older people because that was their target demographic or did they literally just pick files at random and people who are older are more likely to be getting multiple different prescriptions or to be in a file
cabinet at a pharmacy at any given time, I would think that you're going to have a lot less younger people in the whatever zero to forty five or fifty range than you would people over the age of fifty, which every single victim here was, except for, like we said, Stephanie Gaffney, who was eighteen, but her grandmother was we can assume the intended target.
Yeah, it does make me think that they did additional research, not just getting names and address that maybe they went to these addresses and saw, oh, there's old people living there. They just looks like the type of person who will open up a package if we send it, and that's
why they selected all these people. But it's another interesting comment from that New York Daily News article is that even though they said all this incriminating information about wab Wright and his roommate, they also stated that neither Craigkip or Howard Kip had been completely ruled out as suspects in the murder of Joan Kip, which makes me wonder do they have additional information, because you would think that after having all these packages get sent out to other victims,
like a full decade after Joan was murdered, that you wouldn't be inclined to lean towards Craig or Howard. So do they still think that maybe they murdered Joan and then either a copycat sent out these other packages, or maybe they sent them out in order to divert suspicion from themselves. But it just seems like after all that time that they're pretty much beating a dead horse, still trying to pin the murder on Howard or Craig.
Yeah, this definitely feels like a bit of a reach, especially at this point. Like I understood what investigators were doing when they were looking into Craig and Howard for Jones murder, but now with everything else that's come out, it just seems so unlikely that either of them was involved. And if we think back to the evidence against Craig that they decided to take to trial, they really did not have good evidence. It was wildly circumstantial, and it
was like speculative science. It wasn't a hard science like DNA. You know, when you're looking at snifferdog evidence as being like the cornerstone of your case, you have a problem.
Yeah, exactly. And I think if they had been able to charge Wava or someone else, they might have finally said that we're clearing the kIPS. But I think it was just out of frustration that they've been unable to solve the crime after twenty years and we're just kind of at their wits end that they're saying, well, there's still a possibility it could have been Praig or Howard.
We just don't have the evidence to implicate them. So, like I said, Wabra was serving time in prison when that article was published, but he was finally released in March of two thousand and five. I released a Patreon bonus episode about this in early twenty twenty one, and at the time I had no idea of Stephen Wabra's whereabouts.
I didn't even know if he was still alive. But in December of twenty twenty one, Wabra actually made the news again for getting arrested in an anti vaccine demonstration. You might recall that during that time period, if you wanted to go out to a restaurant, you would actually have to provide proof of vaccination before they would seat you. But Wabar was part of a group that decided to
stay a sit in demonstration. They showed up at a cheesecake factory at a queen's mall where they said they weren't vaccinated, and they just decided to like chain themselves to the seats and refused to leave, and then they called in the police and then they were carted out
and charged with trespassing. And I think there were six people involved, but I saw the names and one of them was sixty seven year old Steven Wabra, and it's like, yep, the age is correct, and this sounds exactly like something Wabra would do. So I'm pretty sure this is the same guy, and that at least in December of twenty twenty one, he was still alive. But other than that, it sounds like he has kept his nose clean since he was released from prison in two thousand and five.
And they just still haven't been able to find any other evidence to implicate him in these bombings, so officially, the zip gun bomber remains unidentified.
Well, from what we know, Stephen Wavra seems to be the most compelling suspect, and we know that he had to have had a partner or it seems highly probable that he had to have had a partner, and so his roommate would be a logical choice. They're spending a lot of time together. And I do get why they didn't release the name of the roommate because, like I mentioned earlier, he could have been unfairly targeted and maybe
they weren't quite sure. Don't they have laws like that to shield criminals in maybe in Australia.
I think so, and also in places like Ireland where people will be arrested for questioning but they won't release their names to the public. But yeah, Wabra, if he was responsible, just to look at the timeline here, he obviously could not have personally mailed the package to Joan Kip in nineteen eighty two since he was in jail, so he would have needed to get his roommate to
do it. He could have mailed out the first three packages from nineteen ninety three until nineteen ninety five, but of course the last one took place after he was re arrested, So in that case, the one to Richard Basil, he would have needed to get his roommate to mail out on his behalf if he was guilty, So that is a theory that makes the most sense to me. I don't believe that Howard or Craig Kip were guilty of this crime. It doesn't make any sense. They had
no motive. So I think that if it was Wabra, then for whatever reason he decided to target Joan Kip, and then maybe he did it was a one only thing,
like maybe it was a personal grudge. But then a decade later he was feeling antsy again because the unibomber was getting attention and he wanted to do something to get head, so he started mailing out the packages again, and once he went to prison, and then once the unibomber was captured, maybe the roommate said no way, I'm not going to mail any more packages on your behalf,
and that's why they suddenly stopped. Because Wabra was incarcerated from nineteen ninety six until two thousand and five, and the packages came to an end once they came up with the zipgun bomber title and it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries. So I think that's probably what happened if we're going by the most logical thing is that these two men worked in cahoots together, but we're still not really going to know the motive and why they selected these particular victims.
I think given what little information we have, it's pretty easy to operate under the presupposition that Wavra did indeed have some involvement in this, specifically with Joan because of his tie to her and the hollowed out books, and
then potentially the roommate or somebody else continued on. But we also have to entertain the possibility that there could be somebody out there who police haven't been able to question or hasn't even been on their radar, who could be responsible for this, because I mean, if we look at Wavra without having an accomplice, he could not have done it because he was locked up for the three
other attacks. Yes, he could have done Jones, but the similarities between the two seems to indicate that there was one offender involved in both series of attacks, whether or not they were the one that executed it both times remains up for debate. One last thing. We also have to assume that either Wavra was the mastermind or the roommate was the mastermind, because somebody had to have taught the other person unless somehow they were in some program
together where they had some kind of engineering education. But that seems more unlikely than one of them being the mastermind and the other kind of just going along for the ride. But we have to assume that there is a second person in order for Waba to be the guy. So there's just so many assumptions and presuppositions that we have to operate under in the way that we're trying
to gut us. But like the investigators are trying to make Wabra the guy, it almost feels a little unindicted co conspirator or unindicted co ejaculator.
Yeah, that is the problem, is that there is not
one theory that makes sense in this case. And for all we know, maybe the roommate was the main mastermind and Wabra helped him out a few times in the nineties, even though maybe it was the roommate's idea to mail the package to Joan Kip but of course the other simple solution is that it's someone that has not popped up on the radar as a suspect, that just mailed out all of them at the same time, maybe had no connection to any of the victims, just selected them
at random in the phone book, and then just decided to do this and has managed to get away with it for over forty years. But of course that only opens up a whole bunch of other unanswered questions, is like, why did he do it once in the eighties and why did he decide to come back and start doing
it in the nineties. And I'm thinking that if there was like a reason that these victims were personally targeted, it would have been so much easier just to send a bomb that explodes which will kill you instantly, because as you see, this one had a ratio of one out of five that actually killed someone. It had a batting average of two hundred. So it makes me think that if you really wanted to kill these people, if you had a personal vendetta, you would have sent a
bomb and something a lot less complicated. So it makes me think that the person all they cared about was causing fear, causing injuries and that killing these particular victims was of secondary importance.
That makes sense to me. But if they were operating in tandem, and let's just say that it was the roommate who was indeed the mastermind, I find it curious that this person, who obviously would have to be very calculated, very methodical, would have somebody as chaotic and seemingly unpredictable
as Wabra pick the victim, even if at random. It just seems like that wouldn't be something that you would want to trust somebody like him with if you're somebody who's very controlling in nature and calculated, which it seems like the person who would be the mastermind of this would be, because you have to lay in wait. It takes a long time to build a device like this to choose the victims. And so maybe Wavra shows Joan Kip, but he didn't say that he had a connection to her.
Because if the roommate is the mastermind, even if it's anybody attached to Wavra, if Wavra picks a victim that can be traced back to him, then this other individual could then be traced back to the victim by a couple degrees of separation, so it wouldn't be the most intelligent move, and we see criminals make mistakes all the time, so of course that's not outside the realm of possibility, which also makes me think, Okay, so if maybe they had this big plan where they wanted, like you said,
to be out there causing all of this like fear in mayhem, then being famous indirectly for what they've done, and just to do it one time to Joan Kip, that seems really curious because if your objective is to create this panic in the public and to become famous in a way or infamous, then just doing it one time,
maybe something was going on behind the scenes. Maybe the mastermind whomever that was, found out that Joan Kip had that connection to Wavra and then became really paranoid and was like, okay, we better sit back and not do anything for a while, because what if this is tied back to us, And if that was the thought process of the person who was the mastermind, then maybe they
were just a better criminal than Wavra. And there's a reason that they haven't been caught because Wavra has made some egregious errors and he's very impulsive in the way that he's acted, so it's not really a shocker that he ended up behind bars not for this, but for something else. And so the fact that we don't have this other individual behind bars insofar as we know, may lend some credence to the idea that the mastermind was definitely not Wavra.
We talked about Louis Sappola, how the fact that he got arrested for throwing a hand grenade at his enemy leads away from him doing such an intricate crime which requires a lot of patients. And we've seen Wavra do other irrational stuff like throw pepper in the eyes of an MP, And you're thinking, could the same guy who do something like that really have the patience and know withal to like construct a device like this and send it off in the mail and not have any evidence
pointing towards themselves. So yeah, this could be, for all we know, a complete genius mastermind who has never been arrested for anything and has managed to stay out the radar for forty years. So yeah, I guess that's about all I have to say about it. I don't know if it'll ever be solved after all this time. I guess the news is that this is a crime in which most of the victims were only injured and only
one of them wound up getting murdered. But it is still a major tragedy for the kid family because not only did they lose Joan, but also Craig had to be what I think was unjustly accused of the crime and nearly wound up going on trial. And even though he never actually got convicted, never went to trial or spend any time in prison, he still had to live with an accusation of having killed someone and caused his
entire family to relocate from New York to Massachusetts. And I'm sure it must have broken their heart that even twenty years later, when they found Wabra as a suspect, they still said, well, we still haven't cleared Craig or Howard. We haven't completely eliminated them, So they never officially got their names cleared. So if the kIPS are completely innocent, I feel so bad for them. I feel more sympathy for them than anyone else in this story.
I agree they lost so much. It would be so catastrophic to lose your wife, to lose your mother with the murder of Joan, but then to have Craig accused and Howard under this cloud of suspicion. This poor family suffered immensely and I'm sure continued to suffer as it reverberated outwards through the years when they noticed those holidays that Joan wasn't there for, or maybe the people that gave them the side eye on the street who wondered, hmm,
could they have had something to do with it. It's kind of infuriating that they haven't cleared them at this point. When Wavra shows up on the scene, it's like, just say that Howard and Craig had nothing to do with this, and that you guys got it wrong. What does seem clear is the fact that there was immense pressure from the public. There was probably pressure from up the chain,
both with investigators and with the district attorney. There was a lot of people to answer to, and they needed to close this case because the idea that there could be this boogeyman out there who could be sending these zip gun bombs to people, it's unthinkable and the public would not want that, and they would not want that out of their politicians or out of their civil servants. So it could create a really contentious environment and a
pressure work. I don't even think that they would realize that they have tunnel vision, but they could very easily get tunnel vision with regards to Craig. And then Wabra is so interesting because if we are to look at Wabra being in prison, and we are to look at Joan's murder, Joan died was she received two shots I believe from her package the hollowed out cookbook with the zip gun in there. And then the three other victims
they didn't die. And it makes me wonder does it all come down to the angle or is there something in the design that the perpetrator did on purpose where they didn't want to kill anybody. They maybe just wanted to injure them or scare them so that it would create this type of panic or fear or mayhem without the actual carnage, because maybe that was their objective and not the murder itself. But then we know Wavra's locked up for that, So then we questioned, did he do the initial one?
Yeah, it's possible that if it was a copycat or something that maybe they just weren't as skilled, like it could be a thing where Wabra or his roommate was the one who assembled the original device, and the ones that were sent off in the nineties just weren't as expertly put together, and that's why there were no fatalities.
There's just no way to know. But yeah, it's whoever it was, they have left their mark, because this still remains to this day the only crime of this nature that I've ever heard of, involving packages with haulowed out books and medallion boxes that are rigged with zip guns that fire off at people. So even after this person passes away, they're still going to remember the zip gun bomber.
Do you even think that he was involved at all?
I think there is a good chance of that, but I still can't get over the fact that the original one he was in prison for. But the fact that police think that him and the roommate were in cahoots makes me think that it was just like a combined thing where maybe at one time one of them created the device and the second time one of the others created the device, so they kind of took turns or something like that and worked in tandem for over a decade. But I mean, I can't figure out the motive. But
when you see Wabra's other behavior. Maybe trying to figure out a motive is an exercise of futility because we're not dealing with people who are thinking in a rational facts.
This is very true, and I think that's evident from the behavior of Wavra. But if he has this other co conspirator, or it is indeed the roommate, and we just don't know who that roommate is, the connections that they have, the type of life that they've had, what type of emotional trauma and triggers. So there could be a motive that's hidden and we're just incapable of seeing it because we don't understand the connections. And I keep coming back to this over and over and over in
my head. I just can't shake was the first murder of Joan was it because there was more skill and accuracy with the device? Or was it intended to murder her? And then the other three devices were meant not to murder. Was it just such great skill in the design that they didn't end up murdering the three individuals that opened them, or was it a lack of skill. I guess it just depends on how you decide to interpret the evidence.
Or what lens you'd look through, because if you look at it like this, this person who is more skilled, you go, oh, okay, well their objective was different than murder, but the first objective appeared to clearly be murder, So it's just also confusing.
Yeah, and oh, let's also not forget that it also had the note that was addressed to Howard. So it makes me wonder was Howard the target all along? Did someone just want to cause him terror and kill his wife and cause him to live in constant fear for himself and his family? So who knows? Maybe it was someone from Howard's background who sent this whole thing in motion.
Something about the first crime, it just feels a lot more personal.
It does. Yeah, Like the other victims just feel completely random, just selected because their names were drawn out of the phone book or something. But I do think that this first bomb was made by someone who had a personal grudge against the Kit family. So any further thoughts on the zip gun bomber.
My final thoughts are just the same as yours in the sense that somebody had to have had a grudge against the Kit family. They were either targeting Howard or targeting Joan and by targeting Joan, they could have been targeting Howard. The note that was sent to them, and then the fact that she came up with the idea that there could be other people who were being targeted makes me wonder, and it's just one of those things that I can't let go of. Was somebody threatening her?
Did she feel unsafe for some reason in the days, weeks, or months leading up to her death. I really wish that investigators would have had the words that Joan said specifically so that we would know, or that we had just a greater inclination of what she was trying to get across. It's such a tragic end. We have Craig who got really swept up in the mess of it all. I can understand why investigators looked at him, and the
same goes for Howard. But this family truly suffered. There's a lot of victims in this case, but the kIPS family they bore the brunt of it. And I think one of the worst things about this that whomever did this, they still haven't been held accountable for what they did to the entire Kip family. For the fact that Joan lost her life and all of the other victims here that thankfully did not die after their interaction with the device.
So there's just so much tragedy here, and I can't believe after all this time that this case is still unsolved.
Yeah, if it was just these other crimes, there would probably be a statute of limitations on them just because no one was killed. But because Kip was murdered and there's no statute of limitations on murder, this case will always remain open, so there will always be a chance that we could find out who the perpetrator was. Like I said, I have no idea if they've ever attempted to do DNA on this device on any of the books, because that was not an option back in the nineteen eighties.
But I'd like to see them try now because the last few years have shown that forensics has advanced so much that you can extract DNA from anything. So yeah, I guess the last thing I'll say is that if any of you out there receiving any mysterious packages containing cookbooks or boxes of medallions, don't open them. What brings an end to our series about the zip gun bomber. Thank you so much for your support, and we will see you again next week when we talk about another case, Robin, do.
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