Dr. Wood recalls a little argument he had with Burns, Senior, concerning the window weights. Burns felt Wood was wrong in believing they could possibly have come from a new building under construction, or from an old building, either, for that matter. Burns insisted they had been on a junk pile, subjected to the weather for many years. In support of that theory, he pointed to yellowish ingrained discolorations on some of them. “But”, Wood had insisted, “that’s from the sandstone walls of the Morgan bank they hit”.
Young Sherman Burns had said, “That’s just what I told papa”. Subsequent analysis of the discolorations showed that Dr. Wood and Sherman were right.
Some years later Captain Gegan, of the Bomb Squad, wrote a magazine article entitled “How I Reconstructed the Wall Street Bomb”. Dr. Wood never objects, any more than does the fictionally famous “Dr. Thorndyke”, when the police follow up suggestions he has given them and make good use of his ideas as their own. So, indeed, had Captain Gegan reconstructed it — after Wood had found the overlooked fragments and shown him how.
The Wall Street bomb was only a beginning. Wood was later called in to help solve, and did solve, the famous Brady Bomb Case, in Maryland — generally referred to in the annals of mysterious crimes as the Candy-Box Murder. In this case, Dr. Wood not only reconstructed the entire mechanism of the bomb, but turned advisory detective himself, and followed to their ends the clues which brought the murderer to justice.
Both the crime and its solution by Dr. Wood — if one merely pasted together the columns of space devoted to it by the Baltimore and Washington papers, without the inside story given me by Wood himself — had every dramatic element for a super detective novel, in which Dorothy Sayers and Austin Freeman (who invented Wood’s best replica in fiction) might collaborate to put an end to all scientific detective novels — with Lord Peter Wimsey left out. Here’s the true-life story reconstructed with the help of Dr. Wood, supplemented by reference to newspaper files.
Seat Pleasant is a sparsely populated, unimpressive rural hamlet, with modest houses, on the Carmody Road in Maryland, near the District of Columbia line. One of these houses was occupied toward the end of December, 1929, by a Mrs. Anna Buckley, with a family of small children, whose Christmas had been meager. On the evening of the day after Christmas, just before dark, she had chanced to go out on the front porch and remembered later that there was nothing on the porch and nothing near it on the ground. Her front yard was bare clay. Next morning when she went out on the porch again between seven and eight o’clock, there was a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. It looked like a box of candy or cookies or something of the sort, left by a neighbor for her children as a belated Christmas gift. When she picked it up she was disappointed to find written on it, or rather hand printed, in bluish black ink, the name “Naomi Hall”.
She didn’t know anybody named Hall and was tempted to open the package, but being an estimably honest woman decided not to. The children, even more tempted, since they were sure it contained Christmas goodies, were told to “let it alone”, since “it didn’t belong to them”. Mrs. Buckley didn’t bother to lock the package away or hide it from them. They were obedient children — and somebody would almost certainly turn up to claim it before the holidays were over. There was in fact a family of Halls not far away on the same road, and they had an eighteen-year-old daughter named Naomi, but Mrs. Buckley didn’t know of them. Apparently, either they or the Buckleys (the record on this point isn’t clear) had moved there quite recently…
Young Harold Buckley, seven years old, seems, however, to have known all the time who Naomi Hall was. Perhaps he didn’t tell at home because he hoped she’d never claim the candy — and in that case — well, candy would still be candy, no matter how stale. However, on New Year’s morning, when Harold was sent out on an errand and chanced to meet one of the Hall boys, Naomi’s young brother Leslie, his honesty got the better of him, and he said, “There’s a Christmas present, a box of candy or something, for your sister at our house. Somebody left it by mistake”.
This burst of honesty on Harold’s part saved his little life — saved the Buckley household from wreckage and horror.
Leslie got the package later and started home with it, accompanied by a boy named Steuart Carneal.
Naomi Hall was a generous, handsome, even if just then slightly overplump sister, and both boys hoped to share the candy. Naomi took the package to the kitchen table, and the kids, including Leslie, a younger sister Dorothy, and a toddling baby brother Samuel, gathered around her as she opened it. Mrs. Nora Hall, the mother, stood in the background. The Carneal boy was watching through a kitchen window, hoping to be invited in after the package had been opened. Naomi removed the string, took the paper off, and lifted the box’s lid. There was an immediate and terrific explosion. Naomi was literally torn to pieces; Dorothy and baby Samuel were also killed outright. The table and kitchen floor were a mass of wreckage. The explosion had blown a crater in the earth beneath the floor; had also seriously wounded Leslie. Mrs. Hall lay bleeding and unconscious, with an eye and all her teeth destroyed. The Carneal boy, outside the window, had been wounded too.
The explosion brought the whole village, then the police from Washington, which was the nearest metropolis, and later that same day, the police from Baltimore, since the atrocity had occurred in Maryland. Also hearses and ambulances. When Mrs. Hall had regained consciousness, she said, “I was in the kitchen when Leslie brought the package in. We called Naomi to come in and open the box. We were all grouped around the table expecting to see a box of candy and nuts. Then I saw a white flash, and that is all I remember until I was being picked up on the back porch and put in the ambulance”.
The bomb, while containing enough high explosive to wreck a house and massacre a family, had been directed to Naomi in person. But who would have wanted to murder Naomi? And particularly who could have wanted to murder her, yet had known her so slightly that he didn’t even know where she lived! Naomi had been a simple, friendly, attractive country girl, knowing only simple country people like herself. Here indeed, from many angles, and particularly from that of the method which had been used, was an unlikely murder mystery.
Lieutenant Itzel and Detective Schalter of the Baltimore police department, who had active charge of the case, after they’d been called in to help the local constabulary, as Scotland Yard is called to rural districts in England, soon learned that Naomi Hall had been pregnant, and this circumstance, if not a clue, offered at least a first lead to work on. But here, almost immediately, the police came to a sort of double impasse. Naomi Hall had been for some time lawfully married to Herman Brady, a young farmer of the county. The marriage was on record, the young couple were on good terms, as far as anybody knew, and the marriage had been kept a secret from the two families only because Mrs. Brady, Herman’s mother, had opposed it. It meant more mouths to feed. Herman was working his mother’s farm. She was dependent on him, and he hadn’t wanted to tell her about the marriage until he was in a better position to take care of them both. The first impasse confronting the police was the seeming lack of any urgent motivation for murder, even though a baby was expected in a few months. The second impasse was that Herman Brady, a hulking dirt farmer and not a very bright one at that, knew nothing whatever about machinery, mechanics, explosives — never tinkered with gadgets — had never done so in earlier boyhood — had no mechanical ingenuity whatever — couldn’t even mend a broken plow — in short could no more have constructed an infernal machine than have built a rocket to the moon! Of this, the police were absolutely sure, and it turned out they were right.