Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling by Michael Cannell

Author:Michael Cannell [Cannell, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-04-24T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE DEAD FILES

January 1957

In the early morning of January 20, a uniformed police officer drove Commissioner Kennedy in a city-owned Cadillac from his modest Bayside home, with its scruffy rose garden and downstairs rental flat, to Seymour Berkson’s Fifth Avenue address. Kennedy stepped from the elevator on the eleventh floor and entered another world—an apartment with formal French furniture, a pair of maids’ rooms, a Salvador Dalí watercolor, and a wood bust of Berkson’s wife, Eleanor Lambert, carved by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Berkson sat down with Kennedy in a book-lined library overlooking the Central Park reservoir, where the two men, boxer and reporter by background, planned the manhunt’s endgame. The biographical details conveyed in F.P.’s letters had brought the first hope that the two men might identify the bomber, but he could easily slip away if they made a clumsy move.

Dr. Brussel had predicted that F.P. would ache to share his story of martyrdom and vengeance with the world. Berkson and Kennedy played to that inclination as they composed a letter urging him to give himself up. “We feel as you do that we have established a bond of mutual trust,” they wrote. “It is on that basis we urge you now to come forward to avail yourself of the opportunity for justice offered you.… You can decide where, how and when to meet us.… Please write us in the same manner as previously, outlining the procedure you would like to follow for the face-to-face meeting.”

The letter would never be published.

The police had by now reluctantly concluded that Westchester was a dead end. While Berkson and Kennedy played their trust games with F.P., and each other, the massive behind-the-scenes paper chase shifted to the Con Ed offices in New York. F.P.’s successive letters had contained critical details of his personal history—his injury as a Con Ed employee, his frustrated fight for workman’s compensation, his infirmity with pneumonia and tuberculosis. Investigators narrowed their search accordingly.

By mid-January they confined themselves to the rows of beige filing cabinets at a Con Ed warehouse at 157 Hester Street, in lower Manhattan, containing the “dead files,” compensation cases of former employees now closed for good. A few years earlier Con Ed had claimed no knowledge of this archive. The police picked their way through all sixty thousand files looking for employees with the initials F.P., and for characteristics that matched Dr. Brussel’s description.

The dead files contained paperwork dating back to 1940. A thirty-four man police detail finished searching by the morning of January 18. That afternoon Lieutenant Herbert Schenkler, the detective leading the paper hunt, called Con Ed and asked to see the older employee files, from 1930s. Con Ed insisted that files dated prior to 1940 no longer existed.

In reality, Con Ed was hiding them, possibly because they contained embarrassing information about injury and illness caused by air quality at the company’s plants. The company had removed one thousand files marked “troublesome” to a set of filing cabinets housed on the second floor of their Irving Place headquarters, where they could examine them without police meddling.

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