The Zip Gun Bomber Pt. Two

(Part 2) 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: 

• 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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Welcome to part two of our series about the zipgun bombers.
So let's jump right in. So the next incident would
take place on June the twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five,
and the victim, like I just said, was only eighteen
years old. Her name was Stephanie Gaffney and she happened
to be living in her grandparents' residence in Queen's and
was eight and a half months pregnant at that time.

(00:52):
So that day, Stephanie was talking on the phone while
looking through her grandparents mail, and she came across a
package which was postmarked from Manhattan and was addressed to
Gilmore or Occupant, which happened to be the surname of
her grandparents. It was an ad for a company which
offered a health insurance plan. And you're gonna love this.
Stephanie just decides to open her grandparents mail without permission.

(01:14):
But she's eighteen years old, I guess she's immature. And
she wound up finding a blue hardcover book inside, and
when she opened it, it had a homemade zip gun
device go off, and shrapnel actually wound up burning Stephanie
on her abdomen, chest and legs and even though she
was not seriously injured, the incident actually caused some distress
with her unborn child, so the doctors had to take

(01:36):
her to the hospital and induce labor earlier than scheduled.
But thankfully, as Stephanie did give birth to a healthy
baby girl who was not harmed by the last She
was pretty lucky because she had been talking on the
phone when she opened up the book and was a
bit distracted and was holding it at a slight angle
away from her, and that likely prevented the bullets from
directly striking her and probably saved the life of herself

(01:59):
and her child.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
That is so horrifying to think that as Stephanie was
paying attention, she wasn't talking on the phone, and she
held it at a slightly different angle, that the results
could have been very different for her and for her
unborn child. So it's such a blessing that she was
distracted in that moment. But I can't imagine the type
of trauma that would be inflicted upon Stephanie, not just

(02:24):
because of what she experienced, but the danger that her
child was in.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what ultimately happened to
Stephanie and her baby girl who would now be thirty.
So that really makes me feel old thinking that this
took place thirty years ago. But hopefully they went out
and have good lives, though I'm thinking Stephanie probably felt
I am never opening my grandparents mail again after this incident.
Once again, they could not find any reason why the
package was sent to this particular place, and unlike the others,

(02:53):
it didn't have a full name. It just said Gilmore
or occupant. What was interesting is that Stephanie's grandfather and
her uncle were both retired police officers, and a couple
of years before that, her uncle had actually broken up
a Dominican drug gang as part of a major drug bust.
But they looked into that angle couldn't find anything from
either man's careers to suggest that the zip gun bombing

(03:15):
had made them specific targets. So once again, it just
seemed like this place was selected completely at random, and
that even if one of her grandparents was the intended target,
Stephanie was just the unlucky person who happened to open
the package and got injured. But it just added more
perplexing questions to the whole thing, because at this point,
the person that police thought was their prime suspect, Louis

(03:37):
Sippola was now in jail, and now these packages are
still being sent out, so they just don't know what
to make of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
So after the first incident, we had roughly a decade
cooling off period if we're to assume this is the
same person. And then with these three incidents, how close
in time were they? Will you refresh my memory.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Within a year and a half of each other. The
first one was in October of nineteen ninety three, the
next one is April and nineteen ninety four, and this
is June of nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
That's really interesting with the timeline. It makes me wonder
is the offender ramping up or like we've spoken about
fairly extensively in Part one, that there's a possibility that
there is a real victim hidden in there and the
other ones are subterfuge and that's what we're witnessing. But
if that is true and that is the case, the

(04:28):
question then becomes, how do you find the other random victims?
Given the time period we spoke about it, it was
the eighties when Jones murder first happened, and now it's
the nineties, so yes, there is the Internet, but it
isn't what it is today, the ability to find people's
addresses and phone numbers. It's kind of rudimentary compared to
how it would be as far as like looking at

(04:50):
people's social media profiles today, I would think that you
would use something like the phone book, because that would
have been the central location for most of the citizens
in your area.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
I mean, it is possible that maybe, like the first
few victims, were just chosen at random as a distraction,
and that their actual target was someone buried in the
middle of this. I mean, some of these it appears
that there wasn't much research plan because obviously, since this
one was addressed to Gilmore or occupant and didn't have
a full name, that indicates that they didn't know too
much about this family. And of course we already mentioned

(05:22):
that the previous one was for Richard McGarrell, who hadn't
lived at that address in years, So makes me think
that this person did not have much knowledge of this family.
But they looked into the backgrounds of all these victims
and just couldnot find anything like any known enemies they
had who would have had a motive to do this,
And that's why investigators were left so perplexed. But the

(05:43):
last victim was seventy seven year old retired real estate
agent named Richard Basil who lived in the Bensonhurst neighborhood
in Brooklyn, and on June the twentieth, nineteen ninety six,
he received a package which was addressed to his wife,
Marietta and had a return address from the charity March
of New York, though it was postmarked from elsewhere, and

(06:03):
this time around there wasn't actually a book in there.
There was actually a video cassette inside the package, but
when the cassette's container was opened, he had another booby
trapped zipgun device went off and fired three bullets, but
because Richard opened the box at an odd angle from
a distance, he actually escaped injury as all of the
bullets just wound up shattering the window and none of

(06:23):
them struck him, so thankfully, this was an incident in
which Nolan was hurt. But once again, Richard Basil had
no connection to the other victims. He did not have
any known enemies, anything in his background which would have
made him a target, so it just seemed like another
elderly guy who seemed to be selected completely at random, but.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
The one commonality seems to be that everybody's over the
age of fifty four.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Correct pretty much.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, well except for Stephanie, but she was the unintended victim.
The package was addressed to her grandmother's so obviously the
killer wasn't targeting eighteen year old Stephanie. In my opinion,
something about the age range or the demographic feels really calculated.
It just seems unlikely or improbable that if you were

(07:09):
truly choosing victims at random, that you would have all
of your victims within a similar age demographic.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, so it makes me wonder where they were getting
that information. And it is also interesting that Joan Kip
was the only person who was killed. I know, it
was just luck that none of these other victims were killed,
but it makes me wonder if the offender just started escalating,
like they got frustrated that they're like poking up all
these booby trapped devices, yet none of them are fatal.
They're only wounding up injured or not being struck by

(07:38):
bullets at all. And that's why they kept sending off
the packages in such a quicker succession, because they wanted
to kill someone else. Yet they couldn't succeed each time,
so that's why they had to keep repeating themselves.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
I really would like to know more about the March
of Dime's angle, because if you were involved in a
charity at the time, wouldn't it be pretty easy to
get a hold of people's personal information.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
That is possible. It's never been specified if the Basils
were part of the March of Dimes New York. I
know that Richard was the one who opened the package,
but it technically was addressed to his wife, Marietta, So
maybe Marietta donated to them at some point, and maybe
that's the reason Richard wasn't suspicious, thinking, oh, my wife
gets packages from this charity all the time, so I'm

(08:21):
going to open it without a second thought. So after this,
the case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and that's how
I originally heard about it. And after that there were
no more incidents involving these suspicious packages. So maybe the
fact that it was now getting exposure on national television
finally scared the perpetrator off and finally convinced them to stop.

(08:42):
But you may have noticed that there are no actual
bombs connected to this. But I think The reason that
they wanted to call him the zip gun bomber was
because this was the era where the Unibomber was all
over the news when he was finally identified as Ted
Kaczinski and arrested. So of course this was all sensation
thinking if we use the word bomber, this is going
to get a lot more press, and it's going to

(09:04):
get a lot more attention. So that's why they decided
to give him this nickname, even though he technically only
used zip guns and never actually used any bombs. But
this was the only serial mail bombing case who have
ever occurred in the history of New York City, and
it is still unprecedented, as I don't think there have
been any other documented cases in the history of the
country where people have received packages with a booby trapped

(09:27):
zipgun that fires off bullets.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
I've never heard of anything similar to this, But in
all fairness, I was unfamiliar with this case, so I
definitely don't know it all. I find it interesting that
they would call him a bomber. I guess it comes
down to your trying to sell papers. You want eyeballs
on the story and what is more compelling, Like you
said in the era of Ted Kaczinski than calling him

(09:50):
the zipgun bomber. It does have a bit of a
ring to it rather than like the zipgun package guy.
It reminds me a little bit of the stage ha
panic cases from the eighties, where it was like one
seemed to build on the next, and it just created
this kind of frenzy that sold a ton of papers
and had a lot of eyeballs on a lot of

(10:11):
news segments.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Pretty much. Yeah, and now I want to talk about
like how the unibomber might have influenced this offender and
maybe paused him to come out of the spotlight again
in the nineteen nineties, because that's when the unibomber was
getting all this attention. I don't know if this is
just a coincidence, but there was actually a unibomber explosion
on May the fifth, nineteen eighty two, two days before

(10:34):
Joan Kip received her package. It took place in Nashville, Tennessee,
at Vanderbilt University, where a secretary named Janet Smith was
seriously injured by a mail bomb when she opened a
package which been addressed to a computer science professor at
the university. And of course the murder of Joan Kip
took place two days later, and I still wonder could
someone have read about this story in the newspaper and

(10:57):
it gave them the inspiration to send this package to Joe.
But even though the Unibomber had been wanted since the
late nineteen seventies, he actually went through a six year
hiatus in which there were no bombing incidents until there
were two separate mail bomb attacks which took place on
opposite sides of the country on June the twenty second
and June the twenty fourth and of nineteen ninety three.

(11:18):
And then lo and behold, after the Unibomber is thrust
back into the spotlight in the media, the zipgun Bomber
makes his big return and sends a package to Anthony
Lenza less than four months later in October. So it
makes me wonder if the zipgun Bomber, after this decade
long hiatus, read about the Unibomber getting this attention and
then decided, I'm going to go into action again, and

(11:40):
I'm going to send my own special device to people
and hopefully maybe get some of the Unibomber's headlines.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
If that's true, and it is, the same killer, then
it definitely speaks to somebody who really cares what the
public things and wants to have this fearsome reputation a
la BTK. I think if we look even at the
method that the zipgun bomber chose, that speaks to somebody
who wants notoriety. If you wanted something quiet, you could

(12:09):
just poison somebody. You could do it in a way
that wouldn't call such attention with the press. But when
you're orchestrating attacks like these, you're doing multiple attacks, and
they're so intricate, so calculated, seemingly random, and you're using
this carefully constructed zip gun device, you're putting it in

(12:29):
like this blue velvet coin box in some cases in
the cooking in the cookbook for Joan, it just speaks
to somebody who really is thinking, how will my crimes
be perceived? And it also speaks to somebody who wants
their crimes to be tied together.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, that would totally make sense to me that he
was seeing all this attention that the unibomber was getting,
and then even though the zip gun bomber had gotten
away with it for over a decade. I just think
that like the BTK. They just couldn't stand the thought
of not getting any more attention and not being in
the papers, so they had to do something in order
to get themselves back into the spotlight again. And it's

(13:09):
interesting how the Unibomber, one of his later bombs, took
place on April the twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, and
then the Zip gun bomber's attack on Stephanie Gaffney took
place just two months later on June the twenty seventh.
Ted Kaczinski was arrested in April of nineteen ninety six,
and then the package sent off to Richard Basil took

(13:29):
place in June of nineteen ninety six, so only two
months later. So maybe they're thinking of themselves. Kazinski's been caught,
he's in custody. Maybe I'll be the new big boy now,
the new unidentified bomber getting all the attention. But ironically enough,
after the Richard Basil thing, after he finally got the
nickname Zip gun Bomber, he pretty much faded from the spotlight.

(13:50):
So it makes you wonder did something happen to him,
Did he die or go to prison for another crime,
or did he just get paranoid that he was going
to get caught and then bring everything to a stop.
So it would not be until May of two thousand
and two, around the twenty year anniversary of Joan Kipp's death,
that the New York Daily News published an article in
which they reported that two men from Brooklyn who had

(14:11):
once been roommates were being looked at as potential suspects.
The name of one of these men has never been
released publicly. He has only been described as an ex
con and a former roommate of the person I'm going
to talk about now. But the other man was identified
as a forty eight year old Stephen Wavra who had
a history of strange criminal behavior during the early nineteen seventies.

(14:34):
Warbra had served in the Navy, but was diagnosed as
suffering from paranoid schizophrenica, and he had history of run
ins with the law for such offenses as making bomb
threats against postal facilities, and there were even two separate
occasions where Warbra was caught carrying hollowed out books even
though they did not contain any guns or bombs or anything.
But he just had a history of very irrational behavior.

(14:57):
There was one incident where he got into an altercation
outside Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where just one month earlier
he had been released from prison on robbery charges, when
he suddenly decided to throw black pepper into the eyes
of a female MP who was guarding the main gate
at Fort Hamilton, an attacker of the crowbar, and when
another MP attempted to intervene, Wabrah attacked him as well,

(15:19):
and he had to be chased down and restrained by
three soldiers before he was arrested. And when asked why
he did this, Wabra said that he wanted to steal
the forty five caliber handguns that the MPs were carrying
because he was only carrying a twenty two caliber weapon
and he didn't feel it was intimidated enough, so he
had to steal some bigger guns and that was his
loan motive for this crime.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
This is just a really bizarre motive. He sounds like
a pretty odd guy, but it really is the hollowed
out books. For me, I don't know how common it
would be for somebody to be carrying around hollowed out books.
Is this like a spy thing that he read in
the spy magazine and he just started doing it or
is this something that is highly specific to him?

Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yeah, I mean it's just such a specific thing that
you have to wonder could he have had expertise in
making these type of booby traps. Yeah. The first time
he was caught with the hollowed out book was in
nineteen eighty three when police visited Wabra and his roommate
at their apartment to investigate an unrelated case, and they
noticed that he had a hollowed out book and some

(16:23):
bomb making equipment on the kitchen table, and Wabra admitted
that he was planning to use it on a military base,
but he denied ever having sent a device through the mail.
And of course he would go to jail for a
few years for having this illegal equipment. Now, obviously they
should have raised some red flags because Wabra also lived
in New York. We had just had an incident involving

(16:43):
a hallowed out book used to kill a woman. But
by nineteen eighty three they had already charged Craig Kip
and they had still not decided whether or not they
were going to take him to trial. So I think
in the police's eyes they were thinking that, oh, well,
we already got our mand for Joan Kipp's murder, so
obviously this hollow out book must be a coincidence. So
I think that means that Wabra was not properly investigated

(17:04):
at the time because they thought they had already found
their suspect.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
There's a really strange dichotomy here because on one hand,
Wabra sounds like such a great suspect, but when we
look at our suspect, we think somebody who's like cold, calculated, methodical,
but he seems really hot headed. But then when you
go back to the books being hollowed out, that is
so specific and almost impossible to ignore.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
It is. Yes, and as we're going to find out,
there actually is a personal connection between Wabra and Joan Kip,
even though it's a very very loose one. And it
turned out that Joan had actually been Wabra's guidance counselor
when he was attending junior high school. But it's kind
of a weak connection because this would have been something
like fifteen to twenty years before the Zip gone bombing,

(17:52):
so I'm not even sure he would have remembered her
or would have had a motive to select her to
harm her, and the reason he wasn't looked at it
a serious suspect at first is because he was actually
in jail for another crime at the time the hollowed
out book was sent to Joan Kip's address. But like
I mentioned earlier, the police said that they suspected two
people may have been involved, and that possibly he was

(18:15):
getting his roommate to mail mysterious packages on his behalf
while he was incarcerated. So even though we don't have
many details about the roommate, it's possible that if Wabra
assembled the bomb and then went to jail, the roommate
still could have mailed it to Joan on his behalf.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
That's really interesting and it makes me wonder if Joan
Kip was indeed an intended victim, or if there is
a more cold, methodical person who's partnered with Wavra, and
maybe they had the foresight not to want to be
tied to any of these crimes, and so they asked
Wavra to pick somebody at random, and maybe he thought, oh,

(18:54):
this person, Joan Kip, she's far enough removed from me,
nobody's going to tie us together, rather than just picking
a truly random victim. And because we see similar devices.
We know that these crimes are connected to Joan Kipps,
but it could be a different individual doing it because
we know that it can't be Wavra. He's locked up,

(19:15):
and the blue velvet box is different than the hollowed
out book, which maybe was Wavra's signature pretty much.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, like the first one with Joan Kip was a cookbook,
but the ones that were sent off to Anthony Lenza
and Richard McGarrell, those were in the medallion boxes, the
blue velvet boxes, which were so specific that you have
to think they were done by the same person. So
I do think that it's a pretty weak motive to
think that Wabra may have decided to target Joan Kipp
because she had been his guidance counselor because that was

(19:44):
so many years earlier. But it is kind of more
interesting when you think that Joan made all those cryptoc
remarks where she said, quote there will be others, and
she wanted people to notify the school district and all
the other educators to warn them about what was happening,
which gave off the oppression she have had some suspicions
about someone that deliberately targeted her and sent her the

(20:05):
zip gun bomb. So it makes me wonder if she
had gotten an opportunity to be questioned about Stephen Wabra,
I'd be curious to see if she would have said anything,
like maybe she remembered something from her background that maybe
he had a history of using hauled out books or
building bombs or something when he was in junior high
school and she thought he was disturbing kid, or maybe
he had resurfaced recently to make threats against her or something,

(20:27):
and that's why she suspected that he could have been
the one who sent it out. It does seem like
a weak connection, but I still wonder if Joan had
her own ideas about Stephen Wabra.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, it definitely does seem like a weak connection, But
I guess if you look at it one way, you
could say that things had happened to us during our
formative years childhood, high school are deeply impactful, and perhaps
or maybe he perceived the way that she treated him
to be that like he was less than Maybe they
had a positive interaction and rather than come up with

(21:00):
a truly random victim, Wavra, when potentially asked by his
partner to come up with somebody he came up with
Joan Kip and just assumed that investigators would never catch them,
so they would never catch the connection because it was
so many years in the past that there was any
connection that would tie the two of them together.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
We've already seen him do irrational things like throwing pepper
in like the eyes of an MP because they just
wanted to steal her gun. So it could have been
just this long standing grudge that he hung on to
for over fifteen years or something. And even if Joan
didn't even remember him, he still could have remembered her
and then just decided to target her at random. And
no connections have been found between Wavra or any the

(21:42):
other victims from the nineties, so that could have just
been his mo where he'll just pick people at random
and then just decide to mail them packages. Wavra was
out of prison for the first three incidents, which took
place during the nineties, but in April of nineteen ninety six,
he was arrested inside the Brooklyn Public Library for possessing
a hull out book containing exact oblades, and he also

(22:03):
happened to be carrying twenty two caliber rifle shells and
as a convicted Fellon, Warbar was forbidden from possessing ammunitions
such as that, so he wound up receiving a ninety
month since at the Beaumont Federal Prison Complex in Texas.
The Zipgon bomb that was sent to Richard Basil a
couple months later, Warbar would have been in prison for that,
But once again, he still has the connection with his roommate.

(22:26):
I do not believe they were still roommates in nineteen
ninety six, but they were still friends. They were still
in touch with each other. So theoretically, if Warbar was
responsible for the other bombs, he could have had his
roommate mail the one to Richard Basil on his behalf
after he was already sent to prison.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Definitely, anything is possible, especially when you have multiple offenders
that are connected to the same prime.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah, it's kind of why I wish we had more
information on the roommate to know if he had a
history of making devices like that. I'm guessing that the
reason that they maybe haven't named him PUBB is because
he has never been convicted of any of these serious
crimes involving weapons, even though he apparently does have a
criminal history, so they just don't feel comfortable enough to
say his name publicly, whereas Wabra has been in and

(23:12):
out at prison and has a history of erratic behavior,
they were a lot more comfortable using his name in
the newspapers.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
And I think that makes a lot of sense in
most cases, where you have somebody and if you tie
them to this crime without a lot of evidence to
substantiate it, it could greatly prejudice things like their future
job opportunities, their future partners. So unless there is a
lot of evidence and you're going to bring somebody to trial,

(23:39):
I don't really think it's the best thing to be
releasing their names and then being like, oh sorry, just kidding,
like you aren't actually the guilty party, because a lot
of people will have formed their opinions about that person already,
and I'm not sure specifically hear how much evidence they
did or they didn't have about the roommate. But of
course he's going to look like a compelling suspect. He

(24:00):
lives with Wavra, he's got some criminality in his background,
but I don't know how close it's tied to what
happened here, or how good of a suspect he truly was.
For me personally, given what we know thus far about
Wavra and the fact that he had a roommate, it
seems likely to me or probable that there would be

(24:21):
two people involved here, just because we have Wabra locked
up and it's not possible that he could have committed
the other three attacks. So I think that there are
definitely two people involved. And so I can see why
investigators were looking very closely at the roommate.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
It would yeah, and it would explain like how these
packages were still being sent out when Wabar was in prison.
In that aforementioned New York Daily News article from two
thousand and two, it contained an interview with a retired
detective who worked on the case named John Tarangello, and
he made this very weird statement. I'm not sure what
to make of it. Quote. It always came back to
the two of them consistently. There was always a common

(25:01):
denominator between them and the victims, whether it was the pharmacy,
the neighborhood, the hollowed out cookbook. There was a record
of Wavra's pal and the computer of each of the
victims local pharmacies. We can never figure it out end quote.
So I really wish I got more context on the
pharmacies thing, because does this mean that this roommate had
his name and like all these different pharmacies that all

(25:22):
the victims went to. Because if so, that's a hell
of a coincidence, and it makes me wonder, like why
a person would need to go to that many different pharmacies.
And it also makes me wonder, is this where they
were obtaining all the information about the victims? Did they
just maybe follow them to a pharmacy, maybe get an
address off a prescription on a shelf in the background,

(25:43):
and then select them at random. Really makes me wonder,
like what the context of this quote is.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, this is really bizarre. Anytime I hear somebody going
to multiple pharmacies, I always think of people doctor shopping
for drugs. It also makes you question what type of
security measures were there in place in order to protect
the patient's information or was it just really easy to
access back then because it was really during the advent

(26:10):
of like computers and technology, so maybe things were just
kept in file folders.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Yeah, so that's maybe what he was doing, But I
think about some of the outdated information. The fact that
one of the packages was addressed to Richard McGarrell, who
was no longer hadn't lived there for fifteen years. It
makes me wonder if maybe Wavru and his roommate like
snuck into a pharmacy and saw some database which had
an outdated address for Richard McGarrell that was several years old,

(26:36):
and then just said, oh, this person sounds like an
interesting target and sent a package there and not realizing
that Richard was no longer at that address, or it
could explain why when the package was sent to Stephanie Gaffney,
the front of the package just simply said Gilmore or occupant.
Like maybe they saw the name Gilmore and an address
on like a pharmacy prescription or something like that, and

(26:58):
then just picked that even though they did not know
the name of the person who lived there. So it
sounds like they have a little pieces of the puzzle
together involving Wabber in the room make but they just
can't put everything together or figure out enough evidence in
order to make an arrest for either of them.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah, and like we just talked about the likelihood of
there being a database where all of these names were
available and then searched, and that's how the victims were
picked seems unlikely given the time period, But if it
was file folders, it makes you wonder did the zip
gun bomber attack older people because that was their target

(27:34):
demographic or did they literally just pick files at random
and people who are older are more likely to be
getting multiple different prescriptions or to be in a file
cabinet at a pharmacy at any given time, I would
think that you're going to have a lot less younger
people in the whatever zero to forty five or fifty

(27:54):
range than you would people over the age of fifty,
which every single victim here was, except for, like we said,
Stephanie Gaffney, who was eighteen, but her grandmother was we
can assume the intended target.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yeah, it does make me think that they did additional research,
not just getting names and address that maybe they went
to these addresses and saw, oh, there's old people living there.
They just looks like the type of person who will
open up a package if we send it, and that's
why they selected all these people. But it's another interesting
comment from that New York Daily News article is that
even though they said all this incriminating information about wab

(28:29):
Wright and his roommate, they also stated that neither Craigkip
or Howard Kip had been completely ruled out as suspects
in the murder of Joan Kip, which makes me wonder
do they have additional information, because you would think that
after having all these packages get sent out to other victims,
like a full decade after Joan was murdered, that you
wouldn't be inclined to lean towards Craig or Howard. So

(28:51):
do they still think that maybe they murdered Joan and
then either a copycat sent out these other packages, or
maybe they sent them out in order to divert suspicion
from themselves. But it just seems like after all that
time that they're pretty much beating a dead horse, still
trying to pin the murder on Howard or Craig.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, this definitely feels like a bit of a reach,
especially at this point. Like I understood what investigators were
doing when they were looking into Craig and Howard for
Jones murder, but now with everything else that's come out,
it just seems so unlikely that either of them was involved.
And if we think back to the evidence against Craig
that they decided to take to trial, they really did

(29:31):
not have good evidence. It was wildly circumstantial, and it
was like speculative science. It wasn't a hard science like DNA.
You know, when you're looking at snifferdog evidence as being
like the cornerstone of your case, you have a problem.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Yeah, exactly. And I think if they had been able
to charge Wava or someone else, they might have finally
said that we're clearing the kIPS. But I think it
was just out of frustration that they've been unable to
solve the crime after twenty years and we're just kind
of at their wits end that they're saying, well, there's
still a possibility it could have been Praig or Howard.
We just don't have the evidence to implicate them. So,
like I said, Wabra was serving time in prison when

(30:07):
that article was published, but he was finally released in
March of two thousand and five. I released a Patreon
bonus episode about this in early twenty twenty one, and
at the time I had no idea of Stephen Wabra's whereabouts.
I didn't even know if he was still alive. But
in December of twenty twenty one, Wabra actually made the
news again for getting arrested in an anti vaccine demonstration.

(30:31):
You might recall that during that time period, if you
wanted to go out to a restaurant, you would actually
have to provide proof of vaccination before they would seat you.
But Wabar was part of a group that decided to
stay a sit in demonstration. They showed up at a
cheesecake factory at a queen's mall where they said they
weren't vaccinated, and they just decided to like chain themselves

(30:51):
to the seats and refused to leave, and then they
called in the police and then they were carted out
and charged with trespassing. And I think there were six
people involved, but I saw the names and one of
them was sixty seven year old Steven Wabra, and it's like, yep,
the age is correct, and this sounds exactly like something
Wabra would do. So I'm pretty sure this is the
same guy, and that at least in December of twenty

(31:12):
twenty one, he was still alive. But other than that,
it sounds like he has kept his nose clean since
he was released from prison in two thousand and five.
And they just still haven't been able to find any
other evidence to implicate him in these bombings, so officially,
the zip gun bomber remains unidentified.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, from what we know, Stephen Wavra seems to be
the most compelling suspect, and we know that he had
to have had a partner or it seems highly probable
that he had to have had a partner, and so
his roommate would be a logical choice. They're spending a
lot of time together. And I do get why they
didn't release the name of the roommate because, like I
mentioned earlier, he could have been unfairly targeted and maybe

(31:52):
they weren't quite sure. Don't they have laws like that
to shield criminals in maybe in Australia.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
I think so, and also in places like Ireland where
people will be arrested for questioning but they won't release
their names to the public. But yeah, Wabra, if he
was responsible, just to look at the timeline here, he
obviously could not have personally mailed the package to Joan
Kip in nineteen eighty two since he was in jail,
so he would have needed to get his roommate to
do it. He could have mailed out the first three

(32:21):
packages from nineteen ninety three until nineteen ninety five, but
of course the last one took place after he was
re arrested, So in that case, the one to Richard Basil,
he would have needed to get his roommate to mail
out on his behalf if he was guilty, So that
is a theory that makes the most sense to me.
I don't believe that Howard or Craig Kip were guilty
of this crime. It doesn't make any sense. They had

(32:42):
no motive. So I think that if it was Wabra,
then for whatever reason he decided to target Joan Kip,
and then maybe he did it was a one only thing,
like maybe it was a personal grudge. But then a
decade later he was feeling antsy again because the unibomber
was getting attention and he wanted to do something to
get head, so he started mailing out the packages again,

(33:03):
and once he went to prison, and then once the
unibomber was captured, maybe the roommate said no way, I'm
not going to mail any more packages on your behalf,
and that's why they suddenly stopped. Because Wabra was incarcerated
from nineteen ninety six until two thousand and five, and
the packages came to an end once they came up
with the zipgun bomber title and it was featured on
Unsolved Mysteries. So I think that's probably what happened if

(33:25):
we're going by the most logical thing is that these
two men worked in cahoots together, but we're still not
really going to know the motive and why they selected
these particular victims.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
I think given what little information we have, it's pretty
easy to operate under the presupposition that Wavra did indeed
have some involvement in this, specifically with Joan because of
his tie to her and the hollowed out books, and
then potentially the roommate or somebody else continued on. But

(33:55):
we also have to entertain the possibility that there could
be somebody out there who police haven't been able to
question or hasn't even been on their radar, who could
be responsible for this, because I mean, if we look
at Wavra without having an accomplice, he could not have
done it because he was locked up for the three
other attacks. Yes, he could have done Jones, but the

(34:18):
similarities between the two seems to indicate that there was
one offender involved in both series of attacks, whether or
not they were the one that executed it both times
remains up for debate. One last thing. We also have
to assume that either Wavra was the mastermind or the
roommate was the mastermind, because somebody had to have taught

(34:41):
the other person unless somehow they were in some program
together where they had some kind of engineering education. But
that seems more unlikely than one of them being the
mastermind and the other kind of just going along for
the ride. But we have to assume that there is
a second person in order for Waba to be the guy.

(35:04):
So there's just so many assumptions and presuppositions that we
have to operate under in the way that we're trying
to gut us. But like the investigators are trying to
make Wabra the guy, it almost feels a little unindicted
co conspirator or unindicted co ejaculator.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah, that is the problem, is that there is not
one theory that makes sense in this case. And for
all we know, maybe the roommate was the main mastermind
and Wabra helped him out a few times in the nineties,
even though maybe it was the roommate's idea to mail
the package to Joan Kip but of course the other
simple solution is that it's someone that has not popped
up on the radar as a suspect, that just mailed

(35:41):
out all of them at the same time, maybe had
no connection to any of the victims, just selected them
at random in the phone book, and then just decided
to do this and has managed to get away with
it for over forty years. But of course that only
opens up a whole bunch of other unanswered questions, is like,
why did he do it once in the eighties and
why did he decide to come back and start doing
it in the nineties. And I'm thinking that if there

(36:03):
was like a reason that these victims were personally targeted,
it would have been so much easier just to send
a bomb that explodes which will kill you instantly, because
as you see, this one had a ratio of one
out of five that actually killed someone. It had a
batting average of two hundred. So it makes me think
that if you really wanted to kill these people, if
you had a personal vendetta, you would have sent a
bomb and something a lot less complicated. So it makes

(36:26):
me think that the person all they cared about was
causing fear, causing injuries and that killing these particular victims
was of secondary importance.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
That makes sense to me. But if they were operating
in tandem, and let's just say that it was the
roommate who was indeed the mastermind, I find it curious
that this person, who obviously would have to be very calculated,
very methodical, would have somebody as chaotic and seemingly unpredictable
as Wabra pick the victim, even if at random. It

(36:58):
just seems like that wouldn't be something that you would
want to trust somebody like him with if you're somebody
who's very controlling in nature and calculated, which it seems
like the person who would be the mastermind of this
would be, because you have to lay in wait. It
takes a long time to build a device like this
to choose the victims. And so maybe Wavra shows Joan Kip,

(37:21):
but he didn't say that he had a connection to her.
Because if the roommate is the mastermind, even if it's
anybody attached to Wavra, if Wavra picks a victim that
can be traced back to him, then this other individual
could then be traced back to the victim by a
couple degrees of separation, so it wouldn't be the most
intelligent move, and we see criminals make mistakes all the time,

(37:44):
so of course that's not outside the realm of possibility,
which also makes me think, Okay, so if maybe they
had this big plan where they wanted, like you said,
to be out there causing all of this like fear
in mayhem, then being famous indirectly for what they've done,
and just to do it one time to Joan Kip,

(38:05):
that seems really curious because if your objective is to
create this panic in the public and to become famous
in a way or infamous, then just doing it one time,
maybe something was going on behind the scenes. Maybe the
mastermind whomever that was, found out that Joan Kip had
that connection to Wavra and then became really paranoid and

(38:28):
was like, okay, we better sit back and not do
anything for a while, because what if this is tied
back to us, And if that was the thought process
of the person who was the mastermind, then maybe they
were just a better criminal than Wavra. And there's a
reason that they haven't been caught because Wavra has made
some egregious errors and he's very impulsive in the way

(38:49):
that he's acted, so it's not really a shocker that
he ended up behind bars not for this, but for
something else. And so the fact that we don't have
this other individual behind bars insofar as we know, may
lend some credence to the idea that the mastermind was
definitely not Wavra.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
We talked about Louis Sappola, how the fact that he
got arrested for throwing a hand grenade at his enemy
leads away from him doing such an intricate crime which
requires a lot of patients. And we've seen Wavra do
other irrational stuff like throw pepper in the eyes of
an MP, And you're thinking, could the same guy who
do something like that really have the patience and know
withal to like construct a device like this and send

(39:30):
it off in the mail and not have any evidence
pointing towards themselves. So yeah, this could be, for all
we know, a complete genius mastermind who has never been
arrested for anything and has managed to stay out the
radar for forty years. So yeah, I guess that's about
all I have to say about it. I don't know
if it'll ever be solved after all this time. I
guess the news is that this is a crime in

(39:50):
which most of the victims were only injured and only
one of them wound up getting murdered. But it is
still a major tragedy for the kid family because not
only did they lose Joan, but also Craig had to
be what I think was unjustly accused of the crime
and nearly wound up going on trial. And even though
he never actually got convicted, never went to trial or

(40:12):
spend any time in prison, he still had to live
with an accusation of having killed someone and caused his
entire family to relocate from New York to Massachusetts. And
I'm sure it must have broken their heart that even
twenty years later, when they found Wabra as a suspect,
they still said, well, we still haven't cleared Craig or Howard.
We haven't completely eliminated them, So they never officially got

(40:32):
their names cleared. So if the kIPS are completely innocent,
I feel so bad for them. I feel more sympathy
for them than anyone else in this story.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
I agree they lost so much. It would be so
catastrophic to lose your wife, to lose your mother with
the murder of Joan, but then to have Craig accused
and Howard under this cloud of suspicion. This poor family
suffered immensely and I'm sure continued to suffer as it
reverberated outwards through the years when they noticed those holidays

(41:03):
that Joan wasn't there for, or maybe the people that
gave them the side eye on the street who wondered, hmm,
could they have had something to do with it. It's kind
of infuriating that they haven't cleared them at this point.
When Wavra shows up on the scene, it's like, just
say that Howard and Craig had nothing to do with this,
and that you guys got it wrong. What does seem
clear is the fact that there was immense pressure from

(41:24):
the public. There was probably pressure from up the chain,
both with investigators and with the district attorney. There was
a lot of people to answer to, and they needed
to close this case because the idea that there could
be this boogeyman out there who could be sending these
zip gun bombs to people, it's unthinkable and the public
would not want that, and they would not want that

(41:44):
out of their politicians or out of their civil servants.
So it could create a really contentious environment and a
pressure work. I don't even think that they would realize
that they have tunnel vision, but they could very easily
get tunnel vision with regards to Craig. And then Wabra
is so interesting because if we are to look at
Wabra being in prison, and we are to look at

(42:06):
Joan's murder, Joan died was she received two shots I
believe from her package the hollowed out cookbook with the
zip gun in there. And then the three other victims
they didn't die. And it makes me wonder does it
all come down to the angle or is there something
in the design that the perpetrator did on purpose where

(42:27):
they didn't want to kill anybody. They maybe just wanted
to injure them or scare them so that it would
create this type of panic or fear or mayhem without
the actual carnage, because maybe that was their objective and
not the murder itself. But then we know Wavra's locked
up for that, So then we questioned, did he do
the initial one?

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah, it's possible that if it was a copycat or
something that maybe they just weren't as skilled, like it
could be a thing where Wabra or his roommate was
the one who assembled the original device, and the ones
that were sent off in the nineties just weren't as
expertly put together, and that's why there were no fatalities.
There's just no way to know. But yeah, it's whoever
it was, they have left their mark, because this still

(43:09):
remains to this day the only crime of this nature
that I've ever heard of, involving packages with haulowed out
books and medallion boxes that are rigged with zip guns
that fire off at people. So even after this person
passes away, they're still going to remember the zip gun bomber.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Do you even think that he was involved at all?

Speaker 1 (43:27):
I think there is a good chance of that, but
I still can't get over the fact that the original
one he was in prison for. But the fact that
police think that him and the roommate were in cahoots
makes me think that it was just like a combined
thing where maybe at one time one of them created
the device and the second time one of the others
created the device, so they kind of took turns or
something like that and worked in tandem for over a decade.

(43:49):
But I mean, I can't figure out the motive. But
when you see Wabra's other behavior. Maybe trying to figure
out a motive is an exercise of futility because we're
not dealing with people who are thinking in a rational facts.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
This is very true, and I think that's evident from
the behavior of Wavra. But if he has this other
co conspirator, or it is indeed the roommate, and we
just don't know who that roommate is, the connections that
they have, the type of life that they've had, what
type of emotional trauma and triggers. So there could be
a motive that's hidden and we're just incapable of seeing

(44:23):
it because we don't understand the connections. And I keep
coming back to this over and over and over in
my head. I just can't shake was the first murder
of Joan was it because there was more skill and
accuracy with the device? Or was it intended to murder her?
And then the other three devices were meant not to murder.

(44:44):
Was it just such great skill in the design that
they didn't end up murdering the three individuals that opened them,
or was it a lack of skill. I guess it
just depends on how you decide to interpret the evidence.
Or what lens you'd look through, because if you look
at it like this, this person who is more skilled,
you go, oh, okay, well their objective was different than murder,
but the first objective appeared to clearly be murder, So

(45:07):
it's just also confusing.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, and oh, let's also not forget that it also
had the note that was addressed to Howard. So it
makes me wonder was Howard the target all along? Did
someone just want to cause him terror and kill his
wife and cause him to live in constant fear for
himself and his family? So who knows? Maybe it was
someone from Howard's background who sent this whole thing in motion.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Something about the first crime, it just feels a lot
more personal.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
It does. Yeah, Like the other victims just feel completely random,
just selected because their names were drawn out of the
phone book or something. But I do think that this
first bomb was made by someone who had a personal
grudge against the Kit family. So any further thoughts on
the zip gun bomber.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
My final thoughts are just the same as yours in
the sense that somebody had to have had a grudge
against the Kit family. They were either targeting Howard or
targeting Joan and by targeting Joan, they could have been
targeting Howard. The note that was sent to them, and
then the fact that she came up with the idea

(46:09):
that there could be other people who were being targeted
makes me wonder, and it's just one of those things
that I can't let go of. Was somebody threatening her?
Did she feel unsafe for some reason in the days, weeks,
or months leading up to her death. I really wish
that investigators would have had the words that Joan said
specifically so that we would know, or that we had

(46:30):
just a greater inclination of what she was trying to
get across. It's such a tragic end. We have Craig
who got really swept up in the mess of it all.
I can understand why investigators looked at him, and the
same goes for Howard. But this family truly suffered. There's
a lot of victims in this case, but the kIPS

(46:52):
family they bore the brunt of it. And I think
one of the worst things about this that whomever did this,
they still haven't been held accountable for what they did
to the entire Kip family. For the fact that Joan
lost her life and all of the other victims here
that thankfully did not die after their interaction with the device.
So there's just so much tragedy here, and I can't

(47:15):
believe after all this time that this case is still unsolved.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, if it was just these other crimes, there would
probably be a statute of limitations on them just because
no one was killed. But because Kip was murdered and
there's no statute of limitations on murder, this case will
always remain open, so there will always be a chance
that we could find out who the perpetrator was. Like
I said, I have no idea if they've ever attempted
to do DNA on this device on any of the books,

(47:40):
because that was not an option back in the nineteen eighties.
But I'd like to see them try now because the
last few years have shown that forensics has advanced so
much that you can extract DNA from anything. So yeah,
I guess the last thing I'll say is that if
any of you out there receiving any mysterious packages containing
cookbooks or boxes of medallions, don't open them. What brings

(48:00):
an end to our series about the zip gun bomber.
Thank you so much for your support, and we will
see you again next week when we talk about another case, Robin, do.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
You want to tell us a little bit about the
Trail Went Cold Patreon?

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
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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
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(48:34):
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(48:57):
the background, where I just provide trivia and about the
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Speaker 3 (49:16):
So I want to let you know a little bit
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Speaker 1 (49:36):
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Speaker 2 (49:55):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy