November 20, 2025 • 45 mins
Today on the Path Went Chilly Robin and Jules will be covering the unsolved case of a bomber who used a homemade "zip gun" device in their attacks in the early 1980s and 1990s: the name 'bomber' is a bit of a misnomer, since there is technically no bomb but more likely a product of the time period.
Here is a Google AI summary of the cases covered:
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Here is a Google AI summary of the cases covered:
- First Incident (1982): A package containing an explosive device was mailed to Joan Kipp in North Castle, New York. She opened the package, which was disguised as a cookbook, and was killed. The device contained a homemade firearm, or "zip gun", triggered by opening the package.
- Subsequent Incidents (1993): Eleven years later, the bomber struck again, sending more mail bombs to different individuals. One target, Anthony Lenza, was away on vacation, but the bomb shot and injured his children when they opened the package. Another bomb seriously injured Alice Caswell, who opened a package addressed to her brother, Richard McGarrel.
- Victims/Targets: The five intended victims were Joan Kipp (who died), Anthony Lenza, Richard McGarrel, a "Gilmore or Resident," and Richard Basile's wife. A potential link was that all targets might have been former government workers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
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?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No? I have not.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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
(02:17):
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
(02:39):
that connection.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
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
(03:01):
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
(03:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:23):
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
(04:43):
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?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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,
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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,
(06:44):
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
(07:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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
(07:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
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
(08:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
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
(10:21):
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
(10:42):
victims in the past, or there could be future potential victims.
Is that how you took it?
Speaker 1 (10:48):
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
(11:09):
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
(11:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
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
(12:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
would want to murder his entire family.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
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
(13:27):
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,
(13:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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
(14:35):
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,
(14:56):
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
(15:18):
her up and bring her to the station for questioning
right after the funeral ended, and that really rubbed power
the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
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,
(15:46):
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,
(16:11):
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.
(16:33):
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
(16:56):
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.
(17:19):
There's just so many possibilities here because we don't have
the answers and these cases are still unsolved.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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,
(18:54):
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
(19:18):
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
(19:40):
this successfully, let alone him not having a real motive
to kill his own mother.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
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
(20:07):
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
(20:30):
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
(20:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:54):
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,
(22:14):
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,
(22:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:36):
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
(23:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
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
(24:39):
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,
(25:00):
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
(25:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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,
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
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
(27:43):
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
(28:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
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,
(28:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:35):
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,
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:40):
used to kill Joan Kip eleven years earlier.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
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
(31:06):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:26):
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,
(31:47):
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
(32:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
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
(34:09):
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
(34:31):
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
(34:51):
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.
(35:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
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
(35:45):
any mob connection.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
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
(36:43):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
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
(38:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:06):
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,
(39:29):
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
(39:52):
in prisons, so after that he didn't suddenly didn't seem
like such a strong suspect.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
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.
(40:20):
But when they don't, he must have confounded the investigators, going,
who is doing this? We thought that we had our guy.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
(40:48):
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,
(41:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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
(41:38):
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
(42:02):
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
(42:26):
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
(42:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the trail like cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
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?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No? I have not.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
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
(02:17):
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
(02:39):
that connection.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
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
(03:01):
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
(03:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:23):
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
(04:43):
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?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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,
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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,
(06:44):
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
(07:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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
(07:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
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
(08:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
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
(10:21):
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
(10:42):
victims in the past, or there could be future potential victims.
Is that how you took it?
Speaker 1 (10:48):
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
(11:09):
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
(11:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
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
(12:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
would want to murder his entire family.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
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
(13:27):
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,
(13:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
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
(14:35):
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,
(14:56):
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
(15:18):
her up and bring her to the station for questioning
right after the funeral ended, and that really rubbed power
the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
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,
(15:46):
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,
(16:11):
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.
(16:33):
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
(16:56):
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.
(17:19):
There's just so many possibilities here because we don't have
the answers and these cases are still unsolved.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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,
(18:54):
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
(19:18):
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
(19:40):
this successfully, let alone him not having a real motive
to kill his own mother.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
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
(20:07):
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
(20:30):
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
(20:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:54):
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,
(22:14):
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,
(22:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:36):
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
(23:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
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
(24:39):
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,
(25:00):
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
(25:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
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,
(26:04):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
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
(27:43):
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
(28:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
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,
(28:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:35):
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,
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:40):
used to kill Joan Kip eleven years earlier.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
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
(31:06):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:26):
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,
(31:47):
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
(32:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
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
(32:41):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
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
(34:09):
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
(34:31):
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
(34:51):
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.
(35:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
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
(35:45):
any mob connection.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
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
(36:43):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
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
(38:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
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
(38:44):
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
(39:06):
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,
(39:29):
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
(39:52):
in prisons, so after that he didn't suddenly didn't seem
like such a strong suspect.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
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.
(40:20):
But when they don't, he must have confounded the investigators, going,
who is doing this? We thought that we had our guy.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
(40:48):
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,
(41:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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
(41:38):
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
(42:02):
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
(42:26):
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
(42:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the trail like cold Patreon?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy
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