Echoes of Dissent: A Sterling Hall Bomber Vanishes Into the Night

Troy Reeves, who manages the oral history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s archives, was manning a table for the 40th history of the Sterling Hall bombing when a man walked up, looking like “he had come right out of the ’60s” or a “Grateful Dead” concert.

“He…put his hand on the table and leaned in and said: ‘Leo Burt’s alive and knows what you’re doing. Leo Burt’s alive and loves what you’re doing,'” Reeves recalls, referring to the missing Sterling Hall bomber, who vanished in 1970.

Leo Burt alive? The “Ghost of Wisconsin”? Now that would be something.

On Aug. 24, 1970, Burt and three co-conspirators, fueled by anger over the Vietnam War, reduced Sterling Hall and the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC) inside it to rubble, taking the life of a promising young graduate student, Robert Fassnacht. After a short time on the lam, Burt, a “Daily Cardinal” student journalist, former altar boy, and junior varsity rower, climbed through a window at an Ontario, Canada, rooming house and hasn’t been seen since.

The bombers blew up the building on UW-Madison’s campus, which today is rebuilt and houses the Gender & Women’s Studies Department, with a stolen professor’s van packed with homemade explosives that were the equivalent of 3,400 half-pound sticks of dynamite, court records say. They called themselves the “New Year’s Gang.”

The blast lifted squad cars off the ground. Bricks were strewn for blocks, although the shock wave somehow skipped over a church nestled between two science buildings. Inside Sterling Hall, lay the body of Fassnacht, a graduate student researcher and married father of three.

“When I heard the explosion, I went outside, and there were literally papers falling from the sky,” witness Paul Sondel told Media Milwaukee, shades of 9/11.

Reeves and another man had erected the table in a campus library in 2010 to gather stories about Sterling Hall, then and now a divisive topic, its morality clouded by judgments over the Vietnam War and changing post 9/11 perceptions about terrorism.

“The only thing I remember about that person for sure is that he looked like he was male or that he identifies as a male, so that’s how I saw him, and he had a tie dye shirt on,” explained Reeves, who never got the man’s name. The man walked away, and, perhaps with him, one of the last chances to finally unravel the disappearance of Leo Frederick Burt.

“At the time, the bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison was the largest act of domestic terrorism in the U.S., prior to Oklahoma City in 1995,” the FBI wrote in August 2023, when the agency released new age-progression photos of Burt, who would be 75, if he’s still alive, which a host of other people – including his brother – don’t think he is. The last hint of Burt’s proven presence came when he sent a manifesto to a leftist journal called Liberation in 1972.

“Who is right only time will tell,” Burt wrote.

One-by-one, other 1960s-era radicals were captured as the years passed by, including Burt’s three accomplices, brothers Karleton and Dwight Armstrong and David Fine, also UW-Madison students.

Karleton Armstrong received the longest sentence – 23 years – but he didn’t serve much of it. Other 1960s-era violent revolutionaries, like Sara Jane Olson, a murderer turned Minnesota housewife, were eventually brought to justice. She was discovered in 1999 living under an assumed name. Olson served seven years. Yet only Burt remains elusive, despite a long-standing $150,000 reward.

Over the years, the mythology surrounding the Sterling Hall bombing has grown, earning Burt the nickname, “Ghost of Wisconsin.”

“I think what really stuck with us was how indelible that day continued to be, to the people who lived through it, 50 years later,” said Preston Schmitt, who wrote about the bombing for a UW magazine. “An event that’s pretty rare, that’s an event like
9/11. Something you never forget where you were, what you were doing. Maybe there’s only one or two, at most, of these events that happen throughout your life like that.”

A spurt of news stories emerged here or there over the years. Burt might be a homeless man in Denver (DNA proved he wasn’t); he might be the Unabomber (he wasn’t); he was spotted at an anti-war rally; an old friend was sure he saw him walking down an east coast street. The FBI released the age-progression photos this August, sparking a brief round of news coverage. They staked out his parents’ funerals to no avail, sent fingerprints to medical examiner’s offices throughout the country.

But eventually he faded almost into history, and the story of Sterling Hall has somewhat with him. In fact, UW-Madison students strolling past the rebuilt Sterling Hall today mostly didn’t know what we were talking about. “I have never heard anyone talk about it,” said one, Kendall Riddle.

It wasn’t always that way.

Karleton Armstrong, sentenced first back in 1976, became an underground cult hero to those still enraged by American involvement in Vietnam, complete with “Free Karl” T-shirts, one of which is still carefully preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which wants to make sure the tragedy is remembered.

“Karleton is charging a dollar a head; there were 1,700 people the other night. I don’t know where it all went,” a prosecutor, Michael Zaleski, said in court back then, claiming that Armstrong was holding rallies and building a “defense fund.”

The bombing occurred in a period of great tumult in American society, occurring shortly after the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed college students at Kent State.

Paul Soglin, the former mayor of Madison and a prominent anti-war activist, is very familiar with the history. He said that the first demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Madison took place in 1963.

Civil rights and anti-nuclear war advocates came together to form the anti-Vietnam War movement. “We believed the premise of the war was incorrect, namely that we had to be there to stop Communism,” said Soglin. “As it turned out, we were correct.” However, he opposes violence as a way to stop it.

The Sterling Hall bombing was the final paroxysm in the escalating anti-war protests on the Madison campus, as body bags came home from Vietnam along with stories of atrocities, a draft engulfed the middle class, and journalists at “The Daily Cardinal” and underground publications like “Kaleidoscope,” were writing exposes about the role of the AMRC in the Army’s war effort.

Dr. Chia Vang said the Vietnam War was the first televised war, which impacted people. Individuals would see a daily count of the people who had died on television. She said that research buildings on college campuses, like Sterling Hall, became a symbol of chemical development and military projects.

“It’s just horrific,” Vang said. “When you spray napalm, when you spray agent orange…the chemicals don’t distinguish between a combatant and a child and elderly people in the village. They kill everybody indiscriminately.”

On the Missing Bomber’s Trail

They say journalism is the rough draft of history, but this is literally history. Eleven student journalists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee spent three months reconstructing the Sterling Hall bombing for an advanced reporting class, dissecting what led up to it, what happened during it, and what came after it, including the lasting implications. Their individual stories are linked throughout this one.

The students grappled with the deeper philosophical questions of when committing violence to stop violence is—if ever—justified.

The Media Milwaukee student journalists made a valiant effort to pick up the trail of the elusive Burt, speaking with a surviving bomber, Burt’s brother, high school classmates, a rowing buddy, former journalists, professors, the man who stumbled over Fassnacht’s body, and more; they pored through hundreds of pages of court files and reviewed materials preserved by the State of Wisconsin Historical Society, including the bombers’ engine block.

“The centerpiece of our collection is the engine block from the Econoline van that Armstrong and his co-conspirators blew up in front of Sterling Hall,” says David Driscoll, curator of economic history at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. “Extensive research confirms it is the type of engine from that van, and it holds historical significance.”

As for Burt, despite Reeves’ anecdote, the common assumption is that he is probably dead, although there are those who think he’s living a life in Canada somewhere, serving as a professor, or was a federal plant all along.

“He’s been out of our lives for 53 years. He did it, and that’s the last we’ve heard of him,” insisted Burt’s brother, Donald, speaking to Media Milwaukee from his home back in Pennsylvania, where the Burt family was well-known for its Catholicism, prominent theologian relative and ties to Villanova University.

“The story is ancient history. As far as the FBI knows, they think he’s dead.” The FBI did not respond to attempts to reach a case agent.

A former high school classmate of Leo Burt’s said that other classmates have speculated that he’s dead at past reunions too.

“He’s sort of forgotten in history, I guess,” Richard Colagiacomo a former high-school classmate of Burt’s, told Media Milwaukee.

Where does he think Burt is?

“People went to Canada; that’s possible, I don’t know. He could be anywhere. He could be walking around amongst us,” Colagiacomo said, before musing: “I don’t think he would” be able to cut off his entire family for 50 years.

Some believe Burt could have been an “agent provocateur,” basically a federal plant, citing his lengthy disappearance, the fact he was unceremoniously removed from the FBI’s Most Wanted List in 1976 (they said the lenient sentences of the other bombers indicated public perception of their dangerousness had changed), and his ROTC background.

Prosecutors attempted to shoot down this theory in court, though, writing, “The state is unaware of any informants, agent provocateurs, finks, stool pigeons or any person who participated in any way at any time in any of the alleged crimes.” But who knows?

This was the era of COINTELPRO, a covert FBI initiative to infiltrate and “discredit and neutralize organizations considered subversive to U.S. political stability.”

Today’s bombers are executed (like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) or incarcerated for life without parole (like 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui). But the Armstrong brothers and Fine were sentenced in very different times against the backdrop of a public weary of the carnage in an unpopular war. Karleton served seven years, and Dwight Armstrong and David Fine each served only three.

Dwight Armstrong, considered the follower of the two brothers, died in 2010, the same year the man walked up to Reeves’ table.

David Fine is a paralegal in Portland today, barred from practicing law, when he isn’t ranting about Donald Trump on Facebook, organizing for Barack Obama, criticizing violence against pro-BLM protesters or sharing pictures of his cats. “No one — NO ONE! — should be surprised by Trump’s latest ultra-racist outburst. He’s been a white supremacist since his early days in real estate,” Fine wrote in 2018. In 2011, he shared a photo showing him with fellow bomber, Karleton Armstrong, taken after they played a round of golf.

At his sentencing, Fine, who did not respond to requests for comment, compared the Vietnam War to Hiroshima.

“I would just like to point out that today is the 31^st anniversary of a very serious offense of great magnitude namely the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which claimed the lives of 75,000 people,” he said, according to the court transcripts.

“…And I would just like to say that all those who join me in mourning the death of Robert Fassnacht in the bombing of Army Math would also on this day the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, join with me in the mourning of the deaths of 75,000 Japanese people and allied prisoners of war. “

Karleton Armstrong today lives in Madison, almost a stone’s throw from campus. He granted a lengthy interview to Media Milwaukee, after weeks of attempts to reach him. He started the interview by playing the harmonica.

“You know better than to ask that question,” Armstrong said with a laugh after a Media Milwaukee student journalist asked if he knows where Burt is. “I have no idea where he is, but… my standard answer: He doesn’t send me Christmas cards.”

Today, he said his politics are closest to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

In a court hearing in the late 1970s, Armstrong said, according to the voluminous transcripts in the case, “It’s been over three years since I was sentenced. Much has happened to create a new perspective about my actions and my 23-year sentence. The Indochina war has ended.”

“The American people have developed a clearer understanding of the nature of that war and recognize that resistance to that war may have been a just and responsible course of action.”

He continued: “I have already expressed and shall continue to experience for the rest of my life the anguish I feel because of Robert Fassnacht’s death, but I feel that the public emphasizes with the motives for my actions.”

In fact, Karleton Armstrong later ran a smoothie stand near campus and, with his brother, a popular sandwich shop called Radical Rye.

However, in the lengthy phone interview in December 2023, he showed that more remorse has crept up with time.

“If we had known someone was in the building,” Armstrong said, “it would have been hard to do, but we would have taken the van and blown it up in the countryside.”

“You don’t really get over it,” he added.

Yet Armstrong mixes guilt with bravado, even today.

“I decided if they are going to make war on us, we are going to make war on them.”

‘Inherent to Army Operations’

At the heart of it all was the efforts by student journalists, especially Daily Cardinal reporter James Rowen, to expose the AMRC’s connections to the war effort. Rowen would later become husband of presidential candidate George McGovern’s daughter, a Milwaukee Journal reporter and aide to Milwaukee’s mayor.

As part of their investigation, the Media Milwaukee student journalists unearthed a tranche of university documents that make it clear, at long last, how deeply involved AMRC truly was in the Army’s war efforts.

This campus building, with its blatant signage connecting it to the Army, was the focal point of tensions.

“I conceived of many different ways of destroying the Army Math Research Center,” Karleton Armstrong testified during his 1970s-era sentencing, highlighting the AMRC’s central role as the bombers’ motive.

“I decided that the center should be totally destroyed; there should be nothing left of the center except rubble,” he said. “Because the Army Mathematics Research Center represented an insult to every American, and it represented an insult to every student on campus who had protested its presence. It was as though to leave just one brick unshattered would have meant that its presence was still there.”

UW-Madison denied the Media Milwaukee students’ open records requests about Burt, AMRC and the military’s role on campus, but the student journalists unearthed the documents in the voluminous court file instead, some of it now consigned to scads of microfiche in Dane County Circuit Court.

“Certainly the MRC is doing of value to the Army. Indeed it is my responsibility as director to assure that it does,” reads one 1969 letter from AMRC director J. Barkley Rosser, obtained by Media Milwaukee. “Moreover as a taxpayer, I would object if the Army were expending funds for the MRC without getting an adequate return.”

The court records, which include contracts between the Army and UW-Madison, show that, by 1973, three years after Sterling Hall’s bombing, the Army had spent $8.8 million on the AMRC, which was created in 1956 as concerns about the spread of Communism ignited throughout the nation. The World War II generation’s support for a necessary war would clash with changing mores on military power among their offspring.

The center was originally established at the request of Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin, the Army Chief of Research and Development, who saw that, not only the military but the nation as a whole, needed “a centralized research institute to tackle mathematical aspects of the problems of technological development,” a UW-Madison press release, submitted as part of the court file, says.

In exchange for the funding, the university’s AMRC agreed to “conduct mathematical research which has relevance to problems that exist in or are inherent to Army operations, which has emphasis upon long-range investigations and which is intended to lead toward the discovery of techniques that may have application to the Army’s needs,” one contract shows.

In another letter, Rosser lamented, “The Army supports the MRC for the same reason it supports research in weed killers. Better weed killers will improve its efficiency and reduce its costs. Better mathematics will improve its efficiency and reduce its costs.” (MRC and AMRC are the same thing.)

Some of the professors came from Eastern Europe as the Iron Curtain descended over the continent. Rosser noted that one professor working there “is glad the Army is strong enough to keep the Russians from doing to the U.S.A. what they recently did to Czechoslovakia. He is in favor of keeping the Army at least this strong.”

Sounding a bit like a narrator in the modern film, “Oppenheimer,” Rosser philosophized:

“Would it be better if Prometheus had refused to bring the fire to earth? If the human race had refused all arts, crafts, and sciences, which are susceptible of misuse, even language would have been rejected. And men would be only overgrown monkeys, fighting tooth and nail for their share of a limited subsistence.”

Karleton Armstrong’s attorneys used these documents in their attempt to turn his sentencing into a political trial of the Vietnam War, court records reveal, but by the time the others were caught, public anger toward the bombers had faded considerably.

“He’s a classic case of serving his debt to society, coming back, and reintegrating,” Driscoll said or Karleton Armstrong. “Part of it might have been a cool factor, like, ‘Hey, that’s the bomber guy, let’s have lunch there.’ But I think a lot of people in town didn’t really see him as entirely wrong.”

Perhaps ironically, though, the Sterling Hall bombing helped turn public opinion against the anti-Vietnam War movement, perhaps even extending the war itself as a result

“The unintended consequence of the bombing, resulting in a death despite anti-war sentiments, provided critics with ammunition against the anti-war movement,” says UW-Madison Lecturer Leslie A. Bellais, a curator of social history, costumes, and textiles.

“This incident, considered the worst act of domestic terrorism until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, significantly impacted both national and historical perspectives.”

Some see an analogy to current events as new protest movements challenge authority and norms on college campuses.

“In the anti-Vietnam War protests, debates over punishment severity for dissenters were contentious,” says University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Fahed Masalkh. “Empathy for those affected by the war fueled the movements. Similarly, in current protests against war in Palestine, discussions on punishment severity for activists and the struggle to foster empathy for the Palestinian narrative take center stage.”

Driscoll said that, even today, the Sterling Hall bombing remains “deeply ingrained in people’s memories. We held an exhibit and published it online, receiving significant public engagement. People shared their thoughts and reflections in a notebook, emphasizing the personal impact of the event on Madison residents. Despite occurring decades ago, the issues surrounding the incident remain relevant today.”

He added: “It raises questions about the moral and strategic efficacy of resorting to violence, especially when other forms of protest and activism were in place. In the case of the Sterling Hall bombing, it did not change U.S. policy and had devastating consequences for those involved.”

He also draws an analogy to the Black Lives Matter protests. “In a less dramatic way, this reminds me of what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Nobody wants police killing citizens on camera, but when things turn violent downtown, the narrative shifts,” he said, although he thinks some of the narratives were exaggerated.

Up until the bombing, the majority of the students thought the radical leaders were like “Robin Hoods with no weapons, facing a brutal and very well armed establishment,” said Archibald Haller, in an oral history. After the bombing, he said, community perceptions of the students changed.

A ‘Patriotic’ Upbringing

Havertown, Pennsylvania, is a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. Founded in 1681 by Welsh Quakers, it now boasts one of the country’s highest percentages of Irish ancestry. One of those of Irish ancestry is Leo Burt.

Though his name may not be recognizable to many today, in 1970, and the years immediately following, Burt was the most wanted man in America.

Burt was born in Darby, Pennsylvania to Howard and Mary Burt on April 18, 1948. Growing up with two brothers, Donald and Matthew, and three sisters, Rita, Margaret, and Barbara, the family was very Catholic. Leo, whose mother died when he was young, was even an altar boy as a child. Many of Leo’s family members are buried in St. Denis Cemetery in Havertown.

“It was a typical middle-class suburban town outside of Philadelphia,” Jim DeFalco, a former classmate of Burt, told Media Milwaukee. Many of Burt’s classmates are now deceased.

Burt attended St. Denis Parochial School in Havertown and Monsignor Bonner High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. At Monsignor Bonner, an all-boys school, Burt excelled at rowing crew.

“I knew Leo. He sat next to me in one of my classes,” said DeFalco. “He was not a very political person in high school.”

He continued to row crew at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, eventually becoming the No. 4 oar on UW’s junior varsity.

“I know he was very dedicated to rowing,” said former University of Wisconsin-Madison crewmate Bill Evans.

“The crew team had a fairly conservative coach. It was a pretty conservative group of people,” Evans told Media Milwaukee. “Leo had a very distinctive jaw; if I ever saw him I would recognize him. We only overlapped for a couple of years rowing… He was a little short for being an oarsman. I always viewed him as kind of an extremist. ”

Burt rowed crew for two years but after being cut from the team, he became more dedicated to journalism and student politics. He wrote for the campus newspaper The Daily Cardinal.

“He took pleasure in sitting around the Cardinal office with two or three reporters retelling accurately and precisely what he had seen and experienced in student demonstrations,” a campus friend told The New York Times in 1970.

“There was very strong anti-Vietnam feeling in that area; I can see why he was enraged to do what he did,” said Colagiacomo, a Vietnam veteran who opposed the war. “Mostly my whole generation was really against the war and at that time was fed up with it. Everybody was fed up with it.”

As campus protests became more common, Burt decided to cover one for The Daily Cardinal. During the protest, Burt was beaten by a police officer. Many consider this a turning point to radicalization for Burt.

“From the time he was a sophomore in high school to when he was in college, he apparently got radicalized,” said DeFalco. “It didn’t seem in his personality for him to do something like that, but as people change their political views, anything could have happened.”

Brandon Stolie, who wrote his dissertation on the bombing, told Media Milwaukee that Burt started his career at UW-Madison as a sports reporter. He originally came to Wisconsin to join the rowing team. Since Leo was from Havertown, it was common to recruit students from that area because rowing was pretty big there.

Burt covered the Democratic Society and other demonstrations on campus. Leo met David Fine at the Daily Cardinal. In the middle of the 1960s, the Daily Cardinal was a very traditionally liberal student newspaper. However, in 1967, the Dow Chemical protest that turned violent in Madison changed both students and the newsroom in a radicalized way, Stolie said.

Stolie believes that it’s important to highlight that shift because some of the bombers were basically doing the things they were writing about journalistically.

Soglin said the four men who bombed the AMRC were not very well-known among most anti-war protesters.

Soglin believes the destruction of property and human life was horrific, and the New Year’s Gang had no right to bomb the AMRC on behalf of the anti-war movement. The movement was completely thrown off trajectory by the bombing, he said.

Comparisons to Nuremberg

In Madison, Wisconsin, the Armstrong brothers were undergoing a very similar, even patriotic, working class upbringing. This is detailed in sentencing transcripts of testimony from Karl and his father, a World War II veteran.

“My father told me… that he listened on the radio about the Nazi war criminals who were executed,” Karleton testified. “We talked about Nuremberg, and my father couldn’t understand why the German people didn’t resist. He thought just about any act of resistance would have been justified against the Nazis.”

Karleton “analyzed how Hitler came to power” and resolved that “I was prepared to give up my life so that it wouldn’t happen here in America.”

“We totally destroyed German cities,” Karleton testified. “We nuclear bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We committed just as many war crimes as Hitler did during the war.” Hitler, of course, orchestrated the Holocaust, which killed millions of people.

The Armstrong family grew up poor; they lived in a garage and then a municipal housing project next to an Air Base. Karleton grew up “in a constant state of terror” as “deep-rooted fear was indoctrinated into me about Communism.”

“People in my generation, our major concern was to make sure there was peace in the world, and we were going to correct the follies of our elders,” Karleton testified.

He sang in a Madison boys choir and was a good athlete: “I could run like a deer.” He wanted to be a scientist; it was the time of Sputnik. In school, he was a “good patriotic American.”

Then he got to university. At first he studied nuclear engineering and joined ROTC. Once there, he quickly became “very disillusioned by how science was used by the government not just for wars but to oppress the people in this country.” He learned about the treatment of Native Americans and Blacks. He decided the fear of Communism was a “myth.”

A pivotal moment came when Karleton “noticed people protesting the war in Indochina outside the Memorial Union” on UW-Madison’s campus. At first, he thought, “Man, they are really crazy. I thought they must be Communists.” Then he talked to them. “They were very warm people… I began listening to them, and they weren’t crazy.”

Karleton concluded that what the United States was doing in Indochina was “very sound grounds for the people to overthrow the government of the United States.” His radicalization escalated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when he was “dumped in the Chicago River” and “saw people being chased by police down dead-end alleys. I heard people being beaten…. It was like a battle scene.”

Donald Armstrong, the brothers’ father, described Karl as a “free easygoing gentle kid. We brought up these children in a normal matter.”

Taking the witness stand during his son’s sentencing, Donald said he too believed Karl’s beliefs were “formed by the Democratic Convention” of 1968. However, Donald testified, “I don’t think anybody felt any worse about the death of Mr. Fassnacht.”

According to Donald, “My wife and I have enjoyed practically every indignity that is possible for people to take and dig up. I have been personally threatened in everything from being castrated to having my throat cut.”

He was concerned about Karl’s protesting, telling him, “You’re going to get yourself hurt.” Donald Armstrong, a World War II veteran, worked for a factory for 31 years that produced equipment used by the military.

Donald opposed the war, but he didn’t join the protests because he “had a hangup about long hair and this sort of thing… There wasn’t any of the older people involved.” He later felt some guilt about that; maybe if older generations hadn’t left the peaceful protests to the young, his sons wouldn’t have felt compelled to act.

According to Donald, Karleton argued that “Nuremberg was the same kind of war crime being committed here by scientists.”

In contrast, Fine was described as engaged in social justice concerns even back in high school. However, what he and each of the bombers shares was the fact that campus messages radicalized them.

The court file contains letters submitted by a rabbi, relatives and others that sketch out Fine’s Delaware upbringing. Fine was the youngest of the bombers, having entered college at 17.

Rabbi Herbert Drooz wrote that Fine was close to his grandparents “who are utterly devoted congregants, never missing Sabbath worship service.” Fine attended religious school and “of course was always an excellent student. An extraordinarily intellectual and idealistic youngster.”

However, wrote Drooz, he “was gotten up into the association of university students on the extreme left in terms of the Vietnam War.”

A professor at the University of Pittsburgh wrote that Fine and his son “were bitterly exposed to the United States’ participation in the war in Vietnam” on campus, describing Fine as “deeply humane” and “not dogmatic.”

“David Fine proposed solutions for reform which were basically unrealistic and at best immature. He demonstrated his ultimate misjudgment by his participation in the traffic bombing of the army computer building,” the man wrote.

In high school, Fine was interested in the peace movement and ecology and helped set up a student government system, wrote Thomas J. Reece.

”David had a strong commitment to the kinds of things that America stands for but was disappointed and frustrated that so often the American system falls short of its ideals,” he added.

“My generation bore a heavy responsibility for allowing a generation of youth of which David was a part to reach young adulthood facing such agonizing social and moral choices,” Cantor Alex Zimer, of the Temple Ohabei Shalom, explained.

“David made a great and tragic mistake in allowing his moral passion against the war to carry him to such an extreme and violent act. David had always ruled out violence as a means to achieve even worthy ends.”

“I cannot condone what David did. David’s action was legally and morally wrong no matter what his motivation. But it was an act not motivated by any form of self-gain or wish to inflict pain on others. It was motivated by a deep love for his fellowman that somehow was twisted into a destructive path.”

‘They’re Going to Kill Somebody Pretty Soon’

The protests were escalating, and even non-activist students in the UW-Madison dormitories couldn’t escape them.

“I was living in the southeast dorms, and demonstrations came in the courtyard between Ogg Hall and Sellery Hall that made a lot of noise,” said Bill Clausius, a student at the time and later a television reporter in Madison.

“Law enforcement arrived in these dark painted vans. On one side of our floor you could see the cops showing up, and on the other side you could demonstrators in the courtyard.”

Clausius recalled how the “law enforcement in riot gear would move in to get them out of there, and that’s when the tear gas started being thrown around. The demonstrators ran into the dormitory lobbies, and so of course the cops threw tear gas into the lobbies.”

“Unfortunately the tear gas got sucked up into the ventilation system in the dorms which caused a lot of us to evacuate the building. There was no way to escape it,” he added.

Richard Knowles taught in the Department of English at UW-Madison during the Vietnam War era. He said in an oral history preserved by the university that he found himself on the side of authority, attempting to maintain an atmosphere of education amid the anti-war protests.

“My job was to try to give an education to the people who had worked all summer to make the money for this education and had paid their tuition and deserved to get an education, and here were all of these things impeding that,” Knowles said.

In August of 1970, Joseph McBride was 23 years old, working for the Wisconsin State Journal and assigned to cover the protests on campus.

According to McBride, at first the conservative general public was in support of the war. However, once their sons started being drafted and dying in Vietnam, a lot of people changed their minds.

“I thought the war was terrible, but I didn’t approve of violence,” said McBride. “I didn’t approve of firebombing buildings and, certainly, blowing up a building was terrible.”

He recalled the June 1969 issue of Life magazine that documented the pictures of 242 dead soldiers that died in one week brought the stark reality to a lot of people in the US after it had published, and Americans started to become disillusioned.

By 1967, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy administration and once an advocate for the Vietnam War, was seeking peace talks.

The night of the bombing, McBride had been in California working on writing his now republished book on the film director John Ford. Sunday the 23rd, McBride met with the film director Orson Welles and was cast in the film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”

In an interview with Media Milwaukee, McBride recalled that he and Welles had talked about the recent political climate. He told Welles, “The students are getting violent, they’re going to kill somebody pretty soon.”

The New Year’s Gang Forms

Court records, including sentencing transcripts and a fact-sheet submitted by prosecutors, show the painstaking planning that led to the Sterling Hall bombing. But they also painted the bombers as sort of a gang who couldn’t shoot straight.

McBride said that a lot of people think Leo Burt was an agent provocateur working for the US government and that the fact he’s never been found is suggestive that it could be true. He also
cited Leo Burt’s character as something that set him apart from the other members of “The New Year’s Gang,” as the bombers called themselves.

Burt was a member of the ROTC, he was part of the rowing team and, according to McBride, conservative. McBride described the other three co-conspirators as “ne’er-do-wells” and “klutzes.”

“They were kind of anti-war idiots, frankly,” said McBride. “Karl Armstrong was the mastermind of this thing, and his younger brother Dwight, who was kind of passive- who [Karl] manipulated into coming along with him.”

By early summer 1970, Dwight and Karleton were keeping explosives in the basement of their uncle’s home in Minneapolis. They had stolen them from a mining operation in northern Minnesota the court records show.

The brothers started referring to themselves as “the heads of an organization called the New Year’s Gang.”

Karleton’s first attempts to bomb something failed pretty spectacularly. He first tried to bomb the Selective Service office on campus but fire bombed the UW Primate Lab instead, the records say.

“Thus, instead of eliminating an agency that supported guerrilla warfare he almost eliminated an agency that supported gorilla research,” a state motion says, without a hint of humor.

Karleton admitted he had fire bombed the “old red gym” on campus and had mistakenly bombed the wrong part of that building.

He tried to bomb the Wisconsin power-and-light generating station in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, using dynamite, but he was surprised by a guard and fled prior to setting off the charge. He tried to bomb the Badger Ordnance Works in Baraboo. One foiled plot involved a plane the Armstrong brothers were going to fly, loaded with explosives.

On July 13, 1970, Burt and Fine visited the Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations to gather information from an expert about using ammonium nitrate and fuel oil as an explosive. They said they were student journalists writing a story on explosives for The Daily Cardinal.

Around Aug. 14, 1970, Karleton admitted to a witness that there was going to be some “heavy revolutionary activity.” He also admitted that they were going to bomb the AMRC.

On Aug. 16, Burt and Karleton Armstrong rented a U-Haul trailer and attached it to his “yellow 1966 Chevrolet Corvair.” On the same day, Armstrong went to Cepek Construction Company and took “approximately six 55-gallon drums” that he had surveyed earlier. Armstrong then placed the drums in the U-Haul he rented earlier. Burt and Armstrong then traveled to Middleton, Wisconsin, and purchased 46.2 gallons of fuel oil.

On Aug. 17, Armstrong returned the U-Haul trailer. A witness stated that the trailer allegedly “had a strong odor of fuel oil on it.”

On Aug 19, Armstrong, Burt, and Fine rented another U-Haul and then purchased 1,700 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer under Karleton Armstrong’s alias name “George Reed.” The next day, a “White Ford Econoline van truck” was stolen from a UW-Madison professor and his spouse. It was notable for its “Peterson for Governor” signs.

Fine and the other defendants “carefully planned the bombing of Sterling Hall and the mathematics research center,” the court documents say. They built the bomb in a rural staging area.

The FBI later recovered Burt’s notebook at a Madison apartment. It contained a surveillance log of the traffic in the Sterling Hall area between 3 and 4 a.m. Karleton had dropped out of school, but a witness saw him in Sterling Hall two weeks before the bombing.

The notebook contained a diagram of Sterling Hall with an X where the AMRC was located and a rectangle indicating where the truck bomb should be placed. There were sketches of steam tunnels that span the UW-Madison campus and escape routes through manhole covers. Karleton’s fingerprints were on it.

At Leo Burt’s apartment in Madison, the Armstrongs, Burt and Fine agreed that they were going to bomb the AMRC and told a witness that he had better get out of town if “he did not want to be implicated in the bombing.”

The Bombers Strike

On Aug. 24, roughly between the times of 2 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. a witness saw a 1966 Yellow Corvair and white Ford Econoline van driving at a very slow and careful pace down Pennsylvania Avenue to Johnson Street.

At approximately 3:39 a.m., the Madison Police Department received a call that stated the following:

“Okay pig listen and listen good. There is a bomb at the Army Math Research Center, University. It is going up in five minutes. Get everyone out of there, clear the area, warn the hospital. I am not bullsh*tting, Mac. Get everyone out of there now.”

It was David Fine. But prosecutors later noted this call did no good. This was well before the era of cell phones, and there was no easy way to quickly notify the night watchmen. The call came three minutes before the blast.

The message was relayed to the Department of Protection and Security and the Madison Police, which had squad cars at the scene within seconds.

At roughly the same time, Karleton Armstrong was lighting the fuse. Armstrong drove the explosive-laden truck and parked it next to the building.

“I didn’t know if there was anyone in the building, but the light was on in the computer lab. The probability was that there was someone in the computer room,” he testified.

“A lot of things were going through my head at that particular time. I had a stolen vehicle filled with a ton of explosives; there was a consideration on my part that someone was in the building. It was not something I could eliminate. It was something I could minimize.” But he didn’t turn back.

“I drove the truck up to the building. It was directly outside the laboratory that was lit up. That was the only place to place the explosive because that was right in the center of the wing that housed AMRC.”

Karleton testified that he “lit the fuse and got out of the truck and went up to the building and looked into the room.” The fuse had 5.5 minutes. He spent 10-15 seconds at the window. He didn’t see anyone.

“I observed a car that was parked. I observed two bicycles. I observed a light on in the computer room,” he admitted. “I observed a light on in… Mr. Fassnacht’s laboratory. Now that blew me away because you know it hadn’t been reported to me.”

This fact has led some to argue that the bombers should have known someone was inside.

With the fuse quickly burning, Armstrong left the area and, after getting approximately three and a half minutes away, he heard the explosion.

Bruce Fritz, a Capital Times newspaper photographer who was working the night of the bombing, was one of the first people on the scene to take photographs.

“I hopped in my brand-new Beetle. I’m going 70 mph down Williamson Street,” he told Media Milwaukee. “As I was coming down University, there was a piece of concrete about 18 and 8 feet long; it was in the middle… of University Ave. Holy sh*t, they really did blow up Sterling Hall. It was just real freaky.”

About a half hour later, a news station in Milwaukee reported that there was a bombing. “Two hours later, they said someone was killed; that really destroyed me,” Karleton testified in court.

Frank Scarpace, a friend and colleague of Fassnacht’s, was with him that night. “I was helping my friend Bob Fassnacht with an experiment. I came down to the lab and worked alongside him,” Scarpace told Media Milwaukee. “At about midnight, my wife called and wanted me home. Bob packed up his stuff and went home, too.”

But Fassnacht returned. “We heard about the bombing at about 6 a.m., and I would later find out later Bob went back to the lab around 1 a.m.,” Scarpace says today, reflecting on his own near-miss.

Scarpace describes Fassnacht as a gifted person.

“He was a very warm person.” says Scarpace, “He was probably more sympathetic to the people doing the bombing, even though he would never do anything violent.”

Scarpace also describes Fassnacht as a pacifist at his very core.

Others had close calls too.

“My dad was a custodian,” John Gillies told Media Milwaukee. “He was in Van Vleck hall. He was on the first floor mopping when the bomb went off. The only reason he wasn’t killed was because there was a double door. That’s what stopped him from becoming a casualty.”

George Croal was a campus police officer who had been undercover and knew some of the bombers.

“The bombing happened at 4 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I was home in bed asleep, and I was jolted home in bed by what I thought was my water heater in the basement blowing up.”

A Body in the Rubble

Fassnacht’s body was discovered in the wreckage after John Lynch accidentally tripped on him. Lynch lived nearby, and he rushed to the scene when he heard the explosion rock the city.

“I just tripped on, on a submerged body,” Lynch told Media Milwaukee. “He was face down in six or eight inches of water.”

“So, I was quite certain he was dead, he wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t responding.”

Even today, so many years later, his detailed memories paint a harrowing and emotional scene.

“I didn’t fall over him, but I was close to,” Lynch said. “I reached out and I went to feel what it was and then I felt the curly red hair. And Bob had curly red hair for sure.”

Meanwhile, the bombers took flight into the night and ended up in Sauk County, where they camped at Devil’s Lake.

According to the court records:

Around 8 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1970,  Karleton Armstrong and David Fine drove back to Madison in the 1966 yellow Corvair and dropped the car off at Karleton’s family’s house in Madison.

Armstrong and Fine then obtained another vehicle and picked up Leo Burt and Dwight Armstrong, heading towards Ann Arbor, Michigan.

After leaving Michigan, the fugitives headed East to New York City where the Armstrong brothers separated from Burt and Fine. Burt then contacted his friends and went to Boston, Massachusetts.

After a couple of days, both Burt and Fine moved to Peterboro, Ontario, Canada, and registered at a rooming house on Aug. 30, 1970, using alias names. Burt’s was Eugene Fieldston.

On Sept. 4, the FBI manhunt traced the pair to the rooming house. However, when authorities moved in, both Burt and Fine had fled from the house.

Burt would never be seen again.

A Show Trial

At Armstrong’s 1976 sentencing, prosecutor Michael Zaleski, outlined the damage.

“There’s been a deliberate attempt to cloud the real issues and … the seriousness of the acts committed in this case,” he said. “There’s been a smoke screen thrown up by parading in a lot of witnesses talking about a war and deliberate attempt to forget about the ramifications of Mr. Armstrong’s acts.”

He ticked off the consequences. Twenty-six buildings damaged and $2.5 million in damage overall.

In addition to Fassnacht, five other people were in the building that night. William Evans and Roger Whitmer were both injured, “knocked about,” and received cuts and bruises.

Paul Quinn was knocked unconscious. David Schuster broke his shoulder. Norbert Sutter, the night watchman who was in his 50s, suffered “hemorrhaging, skull fractures, cuts and bruises, hearing loss, fragments in the eyes,” the prosecutor said. He was left with memory impairment, disc problems, partial loss of hearing and vision and would “walk for the rest of his life with a limp.”

Fassnacht, 33, was doing postdoctoral work, but it wasn’t for the Army. Sterling Hall housed AMRC but also physics researchers.

Fassnacht was working on a problem involving absolute zero temperatures to combat pollution and bring electricity to rural areas. He was a “brilliant young physicist” who died of internal injuries. His wife and three children left the United States “because she just can’t face it around here,” Zaleski said. He left behind a 3-year-old son and twin daughters, ages 1 and a half. The latter later graduated from UW-Madison; one works for the DNR.

“How do you tell the kids that their dad’s never going to be home again because some maniac blew him up?” Zaleski asked.

Research was destroyed. Two nuclear physics professors dropped out of the field. UW-Madison couldn’t bring in grad students for a year. Rare isotopes from 1957 “unmatched in purity anywhere in the world” were destroyed and “are irreplaceable.” Of 15 years of research, only one or two years of it remained.

“All of this was destroyed in the name of peace.”

The prosecutor said Armstrong “saw cars parked there; he saw bikes parked in the rack there. He saw lights on. He lit the fuse and walked away. Good old nonviolent Karl, old peace loving Karl, old let’s-play-by-the-rules Karl lit the fuse and blew Fassnacht and his building to kingdom come.”

Five minutes later, they would have killed three police officers, Zaleski said.

Court records paint a less than flattering picture of Karl’s statements while on the run.

Karleton told one man that killing Fassnacht “was a tactical error that he had to live with, and he no longer felt any guilt for it and that all it did is tend to make his actions counter-revolutionary rather than revolutionary,” the records say.

Prosecutors wrote that Karleton hoped his “revolutionary brothers”  would remain free and continue their activities. He told another witness, “Everybody has got to die some time,” records alleged. He told people the bombers were planning to “jump to Cuba” if necessary.

Another witness said Karleton had commented that the “whole university should be burned.” He referred to himself as a “mad bomber.”

“There has been a lot of good that’s come out of the anti-war movement,” the prosecutor concluded. That “has now dwindled to a hundred because only a hundred support acts like Mr. Armstrong’s – the lunatic fringe. Every movement has a lunatic fringe. This was the case here.”

“The effect on individuals was vastly asymmetric as well,” Don Reeder said in an oral history preserved by UW-Madison. “I mean, Joe Dillinger, whose student and finally graduate student postdoc was Bob Fassnacht, who was killed. He really never did psychologically recover. He died within three or four years. And he was distraught that whole time. Unable to focus or essentially accomplish anything after that.”

He continued, “There of course were the whole of the nuclear program. Their records were burned and damaged by water when they put out the fires and everything else.” And that was so that, you know, some groups slip by with relatively almost no change to their activities, and others were set back a number of years.”

To the prosecutor, the morality was fairly simple.

“I firmly believe our system of government is imperfect in many respects, but I think it is the best yet devised, and if the recent events in Washington don’t show that the system corrects itself when on a disaster course, I don’t know what will,” he said.

“The system is cleaning itself and is doing it without murders and bombings. People like Karl don’t help.”

An Unwinnable War

Lester Pines was between his sophomore and junior years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the summer of 1970, when the bombing occurred. Five years later, he was admitted to practice law in Wisconsin. Six years later, David Fine’s family hired him to represent the fugitive.

Fine wasn’t captured until Jan. 7, 1976, in San Rafael, California. He had rented a room there, ingratiating himself to the landlord. In a letter to the court, she described how he baked her “some delicious bread” at Christmas time.

“After he was arrested, his spirit has seemed to stay with the house in the guide of the plants he cared for, his cat, his funny car that he used to change the oil for,” she wrote. “I thought of him as cocky but vulnerable.”

But attitudes were shifting.

Jack Loomis, an attorney who was a student on campus right after the bombing, told Media Milwaukee that he continued to see demonstrations on campus after the bombing of Sterling Hall, but that the mentality among demonstrators might have changed.

“It’s not like demonstrations ended, but I do think that people thought that a bridge too far had been crossed with the bombing of the hall and the killing of the research assistant,” Loomis said. “With his death, that changed a lot of people’s attitudes, I thought.”

A botched Weather Underground bombing in March 1970, in which a bomb accidentally exploded in a basement, killing three, had also soured public opinion on the protest movement.

Like many other young people during the time, Pines also opposed the Vietnam War. He said it was an “unwinnable” war and that it was “built on a web of lies” leading back to the Johnson administration.

Pines said that his personal opinion is that Burt is in Canada and has established a new identity. He said that Burt “will never be found – if he’s even still alive.”

Pines said that he kept in contact with Fine and visited him a couple of times while he was serving his prison sentence. He also said that he recently got back into contact with him over Facebook after many years of having no contact with him. He said that he’s also talked to Karl Armstrong over the years.

Pines said that he hopes the legacy of the bombing is to teach future generations to be civically active at the youngest age possible and to continue that civic activity on a constant basis in local, state and national politics. He emphasized the importance of only electing people of, not just good, but excellent moral character.

“In the years since the Vietnam War, we have suffered from leaders who are liars,” said Pines. “…There are no such things as alternative facts.”