# Two Cases So Disturbing… They Still Don’t Make Sense | 256

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 16 Jun 2026, 33 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8841287578.mp3

Join me for 2 chilling cases that are too dark for Netflix. Episode 256 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence

## Transcript

[0:00] On the night of July 4th, 1982, an 18 year old girl drove out to
[0:05] deliver 3 pizzas to a house that never existed.
[0:09] It was on a road where there was no such number and somewhere out
[0:12] there in the dark. She stepped out of her car and
[0:16] simply vanished. When people found the vehicle a
[0:19] short while later, the engine was still running and the pizzas
[0:24] were on the ground. Her case would be solved in
[0:27] large part, but at least one mystery still remains before
[0:30] this case can ever truly be considered closed.
[0:34] Sherri Eyerly had only just started building the early
[0:37] scaffolding of an adult life. She'd been born in December
[0:40] 1963, and by the summer of 1982 she'd graduated from Sprague
[0:47] High School in Salem, OR. She moved into an apartment in
[0:51] the South end of the city with her cousin to make a bit of
[0:54] money. She'd taken a part time job
[0:57] delivering pizzas for the local Domino's.
[1:00] It's the sort of work plenty of new graduates fall into for a
[1:03] season or two before figuring out what comes next.
[1:07] July 4th was of course a holiday, but the pizza business
[1:11] doesn't take holidays and Sherry wasn't even supposed to be on
[1:14] the schedule. But she got called in because
[1:18] she said yes to working that night.
[1:20] She was the one standing behind the counter when a particular
[1:23] order came through that evening. The call came from a man, and he
[1:28] gave his name as Dunbar, presumably a last name.
[1:32] During the conversation, he could reportedly be heard
[1:34] talking to someone else in the room, sorting out what they
[1:37] wanted. What they wanted, in the end,
[1:41] was a destroyer. The shops, everything on it.
[1:45] Pie. Three of them, in fact.
[1:48] He gave an address out on River Haven Drive, in a remote stretch
[1:52] of Salem, down near Brown Island Rd. and the Willamette River.
[1:57] It wasn't the sort of place that saw a lot of late night traffic,
[2:01] and there was one more thing the caller mentioned, almost in
[2:04] passing. He said they'd gotten pizza
[2:07] before from a particular female driver, a young woman who drove
[2:11] an orange Volkswagen, and that she'd know exactly where the
[2:14] place was. It sounded like a harmless
[2:18] request, but really it wasn't. That driver, the one he asked
[2:23] about by description, wasn't working that night.
[2:27] At any rate, it appeared that the caller wanted a woman to
[2:30] come to this desolate address, and he wanted one that was known
[2:33] to come alone, for reasons that aren't quite clear to me.
[2:38] Despite this unusual request, Sherry was the one who was sent
[2:42] alone on the delivery run. She gathered up the three large
[2:46] boxes and left the store at around 9:30 to find an address
[2:51] that was never going to be there.
[2:54] Now, personally, I've never worked at a pizza place, but if
[2:57] you have, I'd definitely like your input on this request.
[3:02] It seems to me that any request for a female pizza delivery
[3:05] driver should be an automatic red flag, a big glaring sign
[3:10] that something might be wrong with this request.
[3:14] Or maybe I've just been researching and writing about
[3:16] true crime cases for too long and it's made me overly
[3:20] cautious. Anyway, let me know in the
[3:23] comments. Sometime that evening out on
[3:27] that quiet Rd. Sherry's delivery car was found
[3:30] abandoned. The accounts differ a little on
[3:33] who exactly stumbled across at first, but the picture they
[3:37] paint is consistent and chilling.
[3:40] The motor was idling. A door hung open.
[3:43] The three large pizza boxes were lying on the ground outside the
[3:47] vehicle, and in the car. Her dog was still waiting.
[3:51] The scene told its own story. One of the pizza boxes on the
[3:56] ground had a tire track pressed across it, while another had the
[4:00] print of a boot. There was no blood and no broken
[4:04] glass, nothing of the loud chaos you might expect from a
[4:08] struggle. To investigators, it didn't read
[4:12] like a young woman who'd wandered off trying to find an
[4:15] address. It looked like a planned
[4:17] abduction that had taken only seconds.
[4:21] When police followed the obvious thread and went looking for the
[4:24] address she'd been sent to, they confirmed what the empty car
[4:28] already suggested. The location was fictitious, the
[4:32] name Dunbar was fake, and when they traced the number the order
[4:36] had come from, it LED back to a motel in Salem.
[4:40] The whole errand had been an invention from the first ring of
[4:43] the phone, and it appeared to be concocted to kidnap the woman
[4:47] who was supposed to be working that night.
[4:50] The day after Sherri disappeared, the phone rang
[4:53] again at the Domino's where she worked.
[4:56] This time the caller demanded money, $50,000 specifically for
[5:01] her safe return for her family. That call must have carried a
[5:06] terrible flicker of hope, since a ransom demand at least implied
[5:10] she was alive. That hope went nowhere, and
[5:14] whoever placed the call never followed up in any way.
[5:18] It remains unclear if that call was a sick prank, or if it
[5:22] actually came from the man who went by Dunbar, or perhaps one
[5:25] of his associates. However, there's strong evidence
[5:29] to suggest it was the latter, but I'll get back to that in a
[5:32] moment. Meanwhile, search parties combed
[5:36] the area around the abandoned car.
[5:38] In the days that followed, police turned up several
[5:41] witnesses who recalled seeing a suspicious older model pickup
[5:45] parked along the roadside around the time Sherry vanished.
[5:49] It was a four wheel drive truck riding on large tires with a
[5:53] pair of spotlights mounted up on the cab.
[5:56] It had been positioned oddly, front end, off the road in the
[6:00] back, facing the pavement, almost as if it were waiting.
[6:05] Nobody could say who it belonged to, and the truck, like Sherry,
[6:09] seemed to evaporate. For a long stretch.
[6:13] The investigation circled one name.
[6:16] Daryl J Wilson drove a lime green pickup, similar to the
[6:19] kind of vehicle witnesses had described near the scene.
[6:23] Then word reached police that Wilson had repainted that truck
[6:26] brown. Not long after, Sherry went
[6:27] missing, a detail that has a way of getting an investigator's
[6:31] attention. He'd reportedly known Sherry,
[6:34] along with another young woman who disappeared from the Salem
[6:37] area around that same period. And I'm just going to give it
[6:41] away here because the coincidences are about to get
[6:45] very weird. This is a good lesson in why
[6:48] strong circumstantial evidence doesn't always add up, and why
[6:52] investigation shouldn't just be stopped when what is about to
[6:55] happen here happens. Wilson wasn't involved in any
[6:59] way, but absolutely every action he took implied he was
[7:02] definitely involved. When detectives questioned him,
[7:07] Wilson first claimed he didn't know Sherri at all, then changed
[7:11] his story and admitted he'd met her at a party.
[7:14] He told them he'd been camping with friends at a lake east of
[7:17] the city the night she vanished. But the trouble was the
[7:20] timeline. There was a window of several
[7:24] hours that he couldn't account for, and Sherri's abduction fell
[7:28] squarely inside it. A month after Sherri disappeared
[7:32] in August 1982, police questioned Wilson again.
[7:37] Just hours later, Wilson decided to pull the curtains on himself,
[7:41] leaving behind no note or anything that might break the
[7:44] case. For years afterward, plenty of
[7:47] people connected to the case were convinced he'd been
[7:49] involved somehow, and it's plain to see why.
[7:54] The timing of his actions obviously suggested guilt, but
[7:57] cold case detectives looking at the file later came to a
[8:01] markedly different conclusion. Wilson never had any real
[8:05] criminal history beyond substance troubles, and there
[8:08] was no suggestion that he was a violent individual.
[8:11] He was, however, extremely paranoid, potentially due to his
[8:15] issues with drugs, and that could explain his actions.
[8:20] Wilson, they decided, didn't fit, and cold case investigators
[8:24] began to suspect that the man who took Sherry had done
[8:28] something like this before and would do it again.
[8:32] But the fact remained that at that time, after Wilson did what
[8:36] he did, the investigation was, for the time being, essentially
[8:41] closed. The case sat unsolved for
[8:44] decades, profiled on national television, kept alive by a
[8:49] family that refused to let it fade.
[8:51] The answer, it turned out, had been sitting in an Oregon prison
[8:55] the whole time, at least to a certain extent.
[9:00] His name was William Scott Smith, an unemployed truck
[9:03] driver from the area and, as it turns out, a prolific serial
[9:08] predator. In 1984, two years after Sherry
[9:12] vanished, Smith abducted and killed two young Salem women who
[9:17] fit the same victim profile as Sherry.
[9:20] He was caught, he confessed, and he was handed two life
[9:24] sentences. But those crimes were only the
[9:27] half of what he had done. He'd been questioned about
[9:30] Sherry early on and had brushed it off, insisting he'd been
[9:34] driving a truck up in Washington at the time.
[9:37] That alibi eventually fell apart, and investigators later
[9:41] found that Smith had been stopped and questioned by police
[9:45] near Salem within hours of Sherry's abduction.
[9:48] This put him exactly where he claimed not to have been at the
[9:51] time of the attack. Cellmates told authorities he
[9:55] talked about being mixed up in something involving a, quote,
[9:58] pizza girl, and some of those statements ended up recorded on
[10:02] tape. Usually I'm wary of anything
[10:05] that comes from a jailhouse snitch for obvious reasons, but
[10:09] I have to respect the commitment to smuggling in a recording
[10:12] device, especially in that era. When detectives finally sat back
[10:18] down with Smith in 2006 and offered him a transfer to a
[10:22] different prison in exchange for cooperation, he started singing
[10:26] like a Canary. What he told them lined up with
[10:29] the physical evidence, and it included things that had never
[10:32] been made public. He knew the pizzas that had been
[10:36] ordered had been called destroyers, something that
[10:39] wasn't known to the public at the time.
[10:43] Since the staff of the Dominoes knew what was ordered, this
[10:46] didn't inherently mean he knew something that no one could have
[10:49] known, but it wasn't publicly reported.
[10:54] He also knew about the $50,000 ransom call, which again wasn't
[10:59] something that was reported. Again, this wasn't something
[11:03] that necessarily couldn't have leaked out, but this was 2 for
[11:06] two on key pieces of evidence not released to the public.
[11:11] He claimed that his accomplice, a man named Roger Nosef, had
[11:15] made the ransom call the day after.
[11:18] Then came the thing that made it absolutely clear that Smith
[11:21] wasn't bluffing for a move to a Comfier prison.
[11:25] He explained that the two of them had meant to grab a
[11:27] different driver, a young woman with the orange Volkswagen.
[11:31] The plan was to hold her for ransom, but she hadn't been
[11:35] working, so they'd taken her replacement instead.
[11:39] They'd flagged Sherry down, dragged her into their truck,
[11:43] driven her to a spot near Smith's parents home, and there
[11:47] he'd ended her life. He didn't indicate what was done
[11:51] to her in detail, or why the plan changed from an abduction
[11:55] for ransom into something so much darker.
[11:59] He said he put her body in the Pudding River, the same water
[12:03] where he disposed of his other victims.
[12:06] He ended up taking the cops out to the location, but
[12:09] unfortunately, there would be no closure for Sherry's family, at
[12:14] least not yet. Repeated flooding over the years
[12:18] had scattered whatever might have been recovered.
[12:21] On December 18th, 2007, William Smith pleaded guilty to Sherry
[12:26] Eyerly's slaying and accepted another life sentence to stack
[12:30] atop the ones he was already serving.
[12:33] Nosef, for his part, succumbed to cancer a few years earlier
[12:37] and was of course never charged. Years later, Smith would confess
[12:43] to another slaying that dated back to 1981, closing yet
[12:47] another old wound in Salem and bringing his victim count to 4.
[12:53] Given the fact that Smith worked as a trucker and had by some
[12:57] accounts, traveled all around the West Coast, the true extent
[13:01] of his crimes likely isn't yet fully known.
[13:06] Ultimately, for me, it's hard to consider this case fully
[13:09] resolved given that Sherry's body was never recovered.
[13:13] It also struck me while I was researching this case that this
[13:16] fact pattern isn't something that could have happened today,
[13:19] at least not exactly. These days, if you were to place
[13:23] a pizza order to a non existent location in a dangerous area,
[13:28] I'm sure it would be immediately flagged and no delivery person
[13:31] would go there. Back in 1982 you could
[13:35] apparently request a female driver to specifically come to
[13:39] your creepy location in the middle of nowhere to a fake
[13:43] address. Another question I have about
[13:46] this case is ultimately whether there's any truth to the ransom
[13:49] plan to begin with. The whole concept of it simply
[13:53] doesn't make any sense to me at all because it relied upon
[13:56] kidnapping a young pizza delivery driver.
[13:59] Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most teenagers
[14:03] working pizza delivery don't have the kind of money to pay
[14:06] big ransoms. People working pizza delivery
[14:09] jobs to scrape by aren't generally born with silver
[14:12] spoons in their mouths either. So I questioned how they figured
[14:16] the family was going to pay 50,000 in 1982.
[14:20] Anyway. I think the whole ransom story
[14:23] is, in essence, just to cover for the much darker reason these
[14:28] two men were specifically targeting a young woman.
[14:35] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy with my usual reminder to hit that
[14:38] subscribe button and tap the notification bell.
[14:41] Also, don't forget to check out the Patreon or the membership to
[14:45] take your support for my channel to the next level.
[14:52] Somewhere in the lunchtime crowd, a man climbed down from a
[14:55] wagon, patted his tired horse, and walked away.
[15:00] Nobody remembered his face, and a minute later, one of the
[15:04] busiest corners in America came apart, and the man who'd done it
[15:08] was already gone. More than 100 years on, we still
[15:12] don't know his name or why he decided to bomb Wall Street, but
[15:16] we have some ideas to understand why someone would aim a bomb at
[15:21] this spot in New York City, It's important to note this wasn't a
[15:24] corner picked at random. In September of 1920, the
[15:28] intersection of Wall and Broad Streets was the financial nerve
[15:31] center of the entire planet, a distinction that hasn't changed
[15:35] much in the intervening years. On one corner stood the New York
[15:39] Stock Exchange. On another there were offices of
[15:43] the Department of the Treasury. And looming over it all SAT 23
[15:47] Wall Street, the squat marble headquarters of JP Morgan, the
[15:53] most powerful private bank on earth.
[15:56] To a certain kind of radical, it was also the beating heart of
[16:00] everything wrong with the world at that moment.
[16:04] It was also, at midday, one of the most crowded places you
[16:08] could possibly find anywhere on earth.
[16:12] The narrow streets filled up at lunchtime with messengers,
[16:15] stenographers, clerks and runners, the young people who
[16:19] actually kept the machine running.
[16:21] They poured out of the buildings in their thousands, jostling
[16:25] along the pavement, grabbing a sandwich, carrying paperwork
[16:29] from one office to the next. If the attacker wanted to hurt
[16:33] the rich and powerful, he picked the wrong crowd, since these
[16:37] were just ordinary workers. But if the attacker wanted to
[16:41] hurt as many people as possible, he likely couldn't have chosen a
[16:44] more devastating location. America in 1920 was a jittery,
[16:50] frightened place, and a wave of anarchist and revolutionary
[16:54] violence had rolled across the country in 1919.
[16:58] This included a coordinated round of letter bombs and
[17:01] package bombs aimed at judges, politicians and businessmen.
[17:07] The government had answered with the Palmer Raids, rounding up
[17:11] suspected radicals by the train load.
[17:14] One of the biggest groups targeted by the raid were a
[17:16] group of violent revolutionaries from Italy, the ones who were
[17:20] responsible for that campaign of letter bombs.
[17:24] But more on them shortly. The Kingdom of Finance and the
[17:28] world of revolutionary politics were already locked in something
[17:32] close to open conflict, and Wall and Broad just happened to be
[17:36] the front line. The morning of Thursday,
[17:40] September 16th, 1920 was absolutely ordinary by the
[17:44] standards of the day. An old horse pulling a covered
[17:48] wagon made its way through the financial district and stopped
[17:51] near the Assay office directly across the street from the
[17:55] Morgan Building. The Assay office was formerly
[17:59] part of the Department of Treasury and was responsible for
[18:02] ensuring the purity of gold and silver coins produced by the
[18:06] United States Mint. If you've never heard of this
[18:09] office before, that's because it was dissolved in 1980, but I
[18:14] digress. Let's get back to the narrative.
[18:17] There was nothing remarkable about a horse drawn delivery
[18:20] wagon on Wall Street, and in fact it would be more odd if it
[18:24] wasn't there. The driver got down from the
[18:27] horse and disappeared into the foot traffic, and for a few
[18:30] minutes the wagon sat there in the sun.
[18:34] Inside it, hidden under whatever covering the bomber had used,
[18:38] SAT roughly 100 lbs of dynamite. Packed around the explosive were
[18:43] about 500 lbs of cast iron sash weights, the heavy
[18:47] counterweights used to hold up window frames.
[18:50] They weren't there by accident or to conceal what was inside
[18:53] the wagon if it was examined by the police.
[18:56] Those weights were there to become shrapnel to scythe
[19:00] outward through the crowd at the speed of a bullet.
[19:04] A timing mechanism ticked quietly down towards 0, and as
[19:08] the bells of nearby Trinity Church finished tolling the noon
[19:11] hour at one minute past 12, the wagon detonated.
[19:17] The blast tore straight up and out, and the horse and wagon
[19:19] were obliterated, reduced to fragments scattered across the
[19:23] district. A wall of iron ripped through
[19:26] the lunch crowd, cutting people down where they stood.
[19:30] Windows shattered for blocks in every direction, and awnings
[19:34] caught fire. The marble face of the Morgan
[19:37] building was scarred and pitted, and inside, glass and debris
[19:42] turned the offices into a slaughterhouse.
[19:45] The shrapnel tore into the surrounding buildings, striking
[19:48] one young man who was simply sitting at his desk, working out
[19:53] on the street. The dead and the dying lay among
[19:56] the overturned carts and the broken stone. 30 people perished
[20:00] almost instantly and within days.
[20:04] As the badly wounded slipped away in the city's hospitals,
[20:07] the toll climbed to 38. Some accounts put the final
[20:12] number at 40, and more than 140 others were seriously hurt.
[20:17] Most of them were the young, ordinary office workers who'd
[20:20] simply been on their lunch break.
[20:24] In the first chaotic minutes, the financial district turned
[20:27] into something out of a nightmare.
[20:29] Smoke hanging over the bodies, survivors staggering and
[20:33] screaming. One future Titan of American
[20:36] life was caught in it. Joseph P Kennedy, the father of
[20:40] a president not yet born, was reportedly knocked clean off his
[20:44] feet by the shockwave. But the moment that truly
[20:48] deserves to be remembered belongs to a 17 year old
[20:51] messenger named James Saul. Rather than run, the teenager
[20:57] jumped into a parked automobile and commandeered it, Grand Theft
[21:00] Auto style, and became the hero of the hour.
[21:04] He loaded it with the wounded and drove 30 injured people to
[21:08] the hospital, trip after trip, while the district was still in
[21:12] chaos. He had no authority to do any of
[21:16] it. He just did it.
[21:17] And in doing so, he saved countless lives.
[21:22] The New York Stock Exchange reacted almost instantly, and
[21:25] within a minute of the explosion, its president halted
[21:28] trading to stop a panic from sweeping the floor.
[21:32] By that afternoon, the exchange's governors had already
[21:35] made their decision. Despite the carnage of the day,
[21:38] the market would open the next morning on time, as if nothing
[21:42] had happened. Ultimately, the optics are
[21:45] pretty poor. And as you'll see in a moment,
[21:48] this apparent defiance also hindered the investigation.
[21:53] The investigation, as you may have guessed, started almost
[21:56] immediately, and the first real clue had actually surfaced
[22:00] before the bomb ever went off. That morning, a letter carrier
[22:05] making his rounds discovered several crudely printed Flyers
[22:09] stuffed into a mailbox a short walk from the blast site.
[22:13] They were printed in rough capital letters, and their
[22:16] message was blunt. They warned that the writers
[22:19] would no longer tolerate the situation, demanded the release
[22:23] of political prisoners and promised vengeance if those
[22:26] demands weren't met. They were signed by a group
[22:30] calling itself the American Anarchist Fighters.
[22:33] And to the men who would lead the investigation, those Flyers
[22:37] said everything. They transformed what was
[22:40] initially treated as a possible accident into an obvious attack.
[22:46] And they pointed in a very specific direction.
[22:49] The crude printing, the threats, the demand to free imprisoned
[22:53] radicals, all of it echoed the Flyers left behind during the
[22:58] bombing campaign of the previous year.
[23:00] The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William J
[23:04] Flynn, recognized the pattern immediately.
[23:08] That said, it's never been conclusively proven that these
[23:11] Flyers were linked to the attacks at all.
[23:14] And as you'll see, there would be another bizarre coincidence
[23:17] around the attacks. Further, no group called the
[23:21] American Anarchist Fighters was ever identified, further
[23:24] obscuring the origin of the threatening material.
[23:28] Also, I just need to take a moment to appreciate the other
[23:31] possible reading of American Anarchist Fighters, since of
[23:35] course it could also imply they were fighting anarchists.
[23:39] Obviously not the case given the context of the letters, but I
[23:42] can see why the name didn't stick to any known group.
[23:47] What followed was one of the largest investigations the
[23:50] country had ever mounted, and one of its most frustrating The
[23:54] Bureau of Investigation, the New York Police Department's bomb
[23:58] squad, the Secret Service, and a small army of private detectives
[24:03] all converged on the case, and almost immediately they hit a
[24:08] wall partly of their own making. The exchange's defiance had a
[24:12] hidden cost. Eager to prove that business
[24:15] couldn't be stopped, cleanup crews swept the entire scene
[24:19] overnight. Wreckage was hauled away and the
[24:22] street was scrubbed clean, all while investigators were looking
[24:26] through the scene. By the time investigators might
[24:29] have wanted to comb the area inch by inch, the evidence was
[24:33] already gone, carted off in the dark to make the corner
[24:37] presentable for the morning bell.
[24:40] It's one of the great forensic tragedies of the era, a crime
[24:43] scene erased before anyone had the chance to fully investigate.
[24:48] This has, of course, led to some very tough questions about why
[24:51] the authorities allowed this cleanup effort to take place.
[24:55] What investigators did have was the horse, or what remained of
[24:59] it, which wasn't all that much. One of the few solid leads was a
[25:04] horseshoe, recently fitted, which suggested the animal had
[25:08] been shod not long before the attack.
[25:12] Detectives fanned out to blacksmiths and stables up and
[25:15] down the Atlantic Coast, visiting hundreds of them.
[25:19] They hoped A farrier would remember the horse and the man
[25:21] who'd brought it in. They chased the sash weights,
[25:25] too, calling on manufacturers and dealers across the country
[25:29] trying to trace where 500 lbs of window counterweights had come
[25:33] from. Every promising thread frayed,
[25:37] and the blacksmith angle LED nowhere conclusive, while the
[25:40] sash weights themselves proved untraceable, a truly bizarre
[25:45] coincidence ended up leading investigators on what turned out
[25:49] to be a wild goose chase. A tennis champion named Edwin
[25:53] Fisher who'd reportedly mailed out postcards warning friends
[25:56] away from Wall Street days before the blast turned out to
[26:00] be a dead end. It was initially believed that
[26:03] he had some insight into what would happen or some sort of
[26:06] involvement. As it turned out, he was simply
[26:10] a troubled man who was constantly predicting disasters
[26:14] and advising his friends to stay away from certain areas.
[26:18] He was the metaphorical broken clock who was right at the day
[26:21] and time in question. In the end, the investigators
[26:26] settled on a theory, even if they could never prove it in
[26:29] court. The most likely culprits, they
[26:32] believed, were Italian anarchists, specifically the
[26:36] followers of Luigi Galliani, the firebrand whose disciples had
[26:40] been behind the 1919 attacks. Those were the attacks on
[26:45] bankers, judges, and others connected to the power structure
[26:49] of America. Galliani himself had already
[26:53] been deported back to Italy for his involvement in a variety of
[26:56] crimes, but his network hadn't vanished with him.
[27:00] The timing told a story of its own, at least according to the
[27:03] investigators. Just five days before the
[27:07] bombing, a Massachusetts grand jury had indicted 2 Italian
[27:11] anarchists named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
[27:16] This was in connection to a robbery and double slaying in
[27:20] South Braintree, allegedly carried out at the behest of
[27:23] someone involved in this anarchist movement.
[27:27] To the galleonists, the indictment of two of their own
[27:30] was a direct attack, and the bombing landed like an answer,
[27:34] at least according to detectives.
[27:37] One name rose above all the others, and it belonged to a man
[27:41] the police never managed to question.
[27:44] Mario Buddha was a galleonist anarchist with a reputation for
[27:47] building bombs. He was an associate of Sacco and
[27:51] Vanzetti and a man already entangled in the events that led
[27:55] to their arrest. Later, researchers, drawing on
[27:58] accounts from his own relatives and fellow anarchists, came to
[28:02] see him as the most probable bomber.
[28:05] He was reportedly skilled with dynamite and known to pack his
[28:09] devices with iron shrapnel, exactly the signature found at
[28:13] Wall Street. But Buddha was never arrested,
[28:17] and the police never even formally questioned him about
[28:19] that day. Within weeks of the explosion,
[28:23] he secured a passport and sailed for Italy, where he stayed for
[28:27] the rest of his life, beyond the reach of American justice.
[28:31] Whether he built the wagon bomb, we'll probably never know,
[28:36] though the case against him is fairly strong, if entirely
[28:39] circumstantial. Notably, even if he was the one
[28:43] who built the massive device, that doesn't answer the question
[28:47] of who actually dumped the horse and carriage there on the day of
[28:50] the attack. Mario Buddha was too valuable an
[28:54] asset to his movement to be placed directly near the blast
[28:57] should something go wrong. Investigators chased other
[29:01] possibilities, too. Until this day, all of these
[29:05] remain on the table, at least to a certain degree.
[29:08] They examined whether Bolsheviks or radical labor groups might
[29:12] have been responsible, theories that fit the anxious politics of
[29:16] the moment. A federal review of the case
[29:19] years later set those aside and pointed back at the Italian
[29:24] anarchists as the most likely culprits.
[29:28] There's even the view that the entire attack wasn't necessarily
[29:32] an intentional event at all, though this is more a reminder
[29:36] of how little anyone can prove about this case.
[29:39] Some have speculated that there wasn't a plot at all, that the
[29:43] entirety of the events of the day came down to carelessness.
[29:48] Under this theory, the driver of the wagon had carelessly left a
[29:52] wagon full of explosives in a high risk area, and may have
[29:56] actually been amongst the victims.
[29:59] Personally, I find this exceedingly unlikely, especially
[30:02] given the fact that the weight seemed clearly to be designed to
[30:05] function as shrapnel. That said, of course, I'm no
[30:09] expert on how to negligently move hazardous materials through
[30:12] a busy area with a horse and buggy, so maybe this isn't quite
[30:16] as unusual as it sounds. Unfortunately, though, given the
[30:21] fact that so much of the evidence was cleaned up before
[30:24] investigators got to it, I feel obliged to say that it isn't
[30:28] theoretically impossible. The active hunt dragged on for
[30:33] more than three years before the leads ran completely dry.
[30:37] The case was shelved over the following years and effectively
[30:40] abandoned by around 1940. The federal government revisited
[30:44] it once more in 1944, reaffirming the anarchist theory
[30:49] and clearing the various radical groups it had once eyed, but no
[30:54] charges ever came. To this day, the Wall Street
[30:58] bombing remains officially unsolved, despite being one of
[31:02] the worst attacks on American soil in history.
[31:05] The property damage alone ran past $2,000,000 in the money of
[31:09] the day, the equivalent of about $33 million today.
[31:15] Of course, that pales in comparison to the human cost of
[31:19] the tragedy, with 38 being the official tally.
[31:23] Given the extreme injuries that people received due to the
[31:26] shrapnel and the poor record keeping of the time, I would
[31:30] imagine that the true toll may be quite a bit higher.
[31:33] And yet, on the morning of September 17th, less than a day
[31:38] after the tragedy, the New York Stock Exchange opened on
[31:41] schedule. Brokers worked beside windows
[31:45] draped in canvas where the glass had been, and there are
[31:48] documented cases of clerks moving through the building in
[31:51] bandages. That same day, at the very
[31:55] corner where the wagon had stood, A patriotic rally went
[31:58] ahead as planned. 10s of thousands of New Yorkers showed
[32:02] up to sing an open defiance of whoever had done this.
[32:06] JP Morgan, the bank made a decision that turned out to be
[32:11] permanent. And this is how I found out
[32:13] about this attack. The bank never repaired the
[32:17] gouges the iron had carved into its marble walls.
[32:20] They left the scars exactly where they were, a deliberate
[32:24] refusal to pretend the wound had never happened.
[32:28] The pockmarks are still there today, at the corner of Wall and
[32:32] Broad, low on the stone where the lunchtime crowd once stood.
[32:38] Most tourists walk past them every day without knowing what
[32:41] they are, and these remain the closest thing to a confession
[32:45] the bomber ever left behind.

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