As America’s involvement in Vietnam continued escalating in the early 1970s, antiwar opposition spread across the country. College campuses were hotbeds of protests, particularly following the shootings at Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Many protested peacefully by having rallies, holding signs opposing the war, and singing “Kumbaya” and “Give Peace a Chance.” Others, however, believed the only way to fight fire was with fire.
Just over three-and-a-half months after the Kent State shootings, a bombing on the University of Wisconsin campus claimed the life of a graduate student and severely injured three other people. Four people were connected to the bombing; three of them were caught and served their sentences.
Despite a massive manhunt, the fourth perpetrator, Leo Burt, has stayed underground and is still being sought over a half-century later.
Leo Burt
On August 24, 1970, Madison residents who lived near the University of Wisconsin were jarred awake at 3:40 a.m. A bomb damaged the six-story Sterling Hall which housed the university’s Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy Departments, as well as equipment belonging to the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Twenty-six adjacent buildings were damaged as well, but Sterling Hall’s primary target, the Army Mathematics Research Center, comprising the buildings second, third, and fourth floors, was relatively unscathed with only a few broken windows.
A Ford Econoline van stolen from a computer science professor had been parked near Sterling Hall. The pilfered vehicle was filled with nearly 2,000 pounds of “ANFO,” ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the same material used in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
The total damage to university property resulting from the bombing was over $2.1 million, equivalent to roughly $12.8 million today. The monetary loss, however, was the least of the harm.
Sterling Hall After The Bombing
The bomb claimed the life of Robert Fassnacht. The thirty-three-year-old graduate student and physics researcher was inside Sterling Hall conducting lab experiments at the time of the detonation. Neither Fassnacht nor the physics department itself was associated with the Army Mathematics Research Center, the target of the bombers.
Robert Fassnacht
Three other people suffered major injuries. David Schuster, a graduate student from South Africa, was buried in the rubble for three hours before being rescued by firemen. The bombing rendered him deaf in one ear and left only partial hearing in the other ear. He also suffered a broken shoulder and fractured ribs.
Physics researcher Paul Quin and University Security Officer Norbert Sutler suffered bruises and cuts from shattered glass. The bombing also destroyed many research papers and experiments conducted by graduate students and scientists, setting back their careers.
David Schuster
The police investigation identified four people involved in the bombing: nineteen-year-old Dwight Armstrong, his twenty-two-year-old brother Karl Armstrong, eighteen-year-old David Fine, and twenty-two-year-old Leo Burt.
Fine and Burt were both University of Wisconsin students who wrote for the campus newspaper The Daily Cardinal; Burt had also previously been a member of the university’s rowing team.
The Armstrong brothers were born and raised in Madison. Karl Armstrong had previously been a UW student but had dropped out the previous year.
The Sterling Hall Bombers
Shortly after 6:00 a.m., approximately two-and-a-half-hours after the blast, a Chevrolet Corvair containing the four men was stopped for speeding near Baraboo, forty-five miles north of Madison. First responders to the bombing had noticed a similar vehicle hastily depart from near Sterling Hall.
The men told the officers they were University of Wisconsin students going on a camping trip. They were questioned for over an hour but were then released after nothing was found at the time connecting them to the bombing.
Police Had The Bombers
But They Didn’t Know It
The men were later found to be radical opponents of the Vietnam War who called themselves the “New Year’s Gang,” a name derived from a New Year’s Eve 1969 exploit in which they had dropped homemade explosives on the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Those bombs had failed to detonate, but, eight months later, their Sterling Hall bomb did ignite.
On September 4, 1970, the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list grew to fourteen members with the additions of the four Sterling Hall bombers.
The Bombers Are Added
To The Ten Most Wanted List
Initially believed to have fled to Cuba, the fugitives were instead found to have to gone north to Toronto, Canada, where Karl Armstrong was arrested on February 16, 1972. He was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison but served only seven years.
After his release, Armstrong returned to Madison, where he operated the Radical Rye Deli near the university campus for several years.
Karl Armstrong Is The First Captured . . .
David Fine was captured in San Rafael, California, on January 7, 1976. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and was released after serving three years.
Fine went on to study law and passed the Oregon bar exam in 1987. He was denied admission to the bar, however, on the grounds that he “had failed to show good moral character.” He appealed, but the Oregon Supreme Court was fine with the Bar Association’s ruling.
. . . And Then David Fine
Dwight Armstrong lived in a Toronto commune under the name “Virgo” for several months after the bombing. He made his way across Canada and settled in Vancouver for approximately three years before returning to America.
The younger Armstrong was tracked to San Francisco and connected with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), shortly after the organization had kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974. He is not, however, believed to have been active in the SLA.
Shortly thereafter, Armstrong returned to Toronto where he was arrested on April 10, 1977. Sentenced to seven years in prison, he, like David Fine, served three years before being released.
In 1987, Armstrong was sentenced to ten years in prison for conspiring to distribute amphetamines in Indiana. After being released from prison the second time, he returned to Madison and worked for Union Cab before purchasing the Radical Rye Deli with his brother Karl.
Dwight Armstrong died from lung cancer in 2010 at age fifty-eight.
. . . Followed By Dwight Armstrong
In a 1986 interview, Karl Armstrong said he and his cohorts chose late August to carry out the bombing because it was between the University’s summer and fall semesters and they did not believe anyone would be in the building in the early morning hours. They were devastated when they learned their bomb had taken the life of Robert Fassnacht and apologized to the scientist’s family and to those injured in the incident, saying “I still feel we can’t rationalize someone getting killed, but at that time we felt we should never have done the bombing at all. Now I don’t feel that way. I feel it was justified and should have been done. It just should have been done more responsibly.”
Armstrong also denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of Leo Burt.
Karl Armstrong Expresses Some Remorse
The FBI says Karl Armstrong and Leo Burt were the ringleaders of the Sterling Hall bombing and that Burt was involved in making and planting the bomb.
Of the four bombers, Burt was found to have the least previous radical involvement, expressing little interest in politics and having participated in the fewest protest demonstrations prior to the Sterling Hall bombing. He is believed to have only developed significant antiwar and antigovernment sentiments after reporting on the Kent State shootings for the Daily Cardinal, the University of Wisconsin campus newspaper.
Leo Burt While A Member Of The
University of Wisconsin Rowing Team
Burt and David Fine were nearly captured on August 30, 1970, only six days after the bombing. The men narrowly escaped as Canadian police closed in on the Peterborough, Ontario, apartment building where they were hiding. A fake ID with Burt’s picture and the name Eugene Donald Fieldston was found in the apartment. Burt may have continued to use that name and is also known to have used the alias Matthew James.
For a time, Leo Burt was suspected by some investigators as possibly being the Unabomber.
Lucky Leo Burt Stays On the Lam
In 2010, following publicity generated from the fortieth anniversary of the Sterling Hall bombing, the FBI received several reported sightings of Burt at a homeless shelter in Denver, Colorado, and other sightings were reported in Lakeland, Washington.
More recently, sightings of Burt have been reported back in Ontario, Canada, in the St. Catherine’s section, where he frequently visited during his youth. None of these sightings, however, could be confirmed.
Computer-Aged Image Of Leo Burt
When last seen over fifty-four years ago, Leo Frederick Burt stood five-feet-eleven-inches tall and weighed approximately one-hundred-eighty-five pounds. He had a lean, muscular, build, hazel eyes, and brown hair, which is likely now gray. Burt also had a mustache and generally wore classes. He may now have a beard.
Additional Computer-Aged Images
Leo Burt was removed from the FBI Ten Most Wanted List in 1976, but he is still sought on charges of Conspiracy, Sabotage, and Destruction of Government Property. He would today be seventy-six-years-old. Many investigators, along with multiple members of Burt’s family, believe he is deceased.
The FBI is offering a $150,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Leo Burt, dead or alive. If you have any such information, please contact the Milwaukee FBI office at 414-276-4684.
The Most Recent Computer-Aged Images Of Leo Burt
Robert Fassnacht’s wife Stephanie also worked at the University of Wisconsin at the time of the Sterling Hall bombing. The school established the Robert Fassnacht Memorial Scholarship, which Stephanie used to further her education at the University. She obtained a Ph.D in Physics and worked on the campus for many years, her office being only a few blocks from where her husband lost his life.
The Fassnacht’s son Chris also obtained a Ph.D in Physics and teaches the subject at the University of California-Davis. Twin daughters Heidi and Karin each obtained their undergraduate degrees from Wisconsin; Karin went on to obtain a Ph.D in Forest Ecology from the University.
Stephanie Fassnacht
Robert’s Widow
Friends and family say Robert Fassnacht was, like the bombers who inadvertently killed him, opposed to the Vietnam War.
A Memorial At The Bombing Site
On September 23, 1970, one month after the Sterling Hall bombing at the University of Wisconsin that killed graduate student Robert Fassnacht, an armed robbery committed in the Brighton section of Boston resulted in the shooting death of Boston Police Officer Walter Schroeder. The perpetrators were found to have also been antiwar radicals motivated by the Kent State shootings.
Two Brandeis University students, Kathy Power and Susan Saxe, were identified as having taken part in the robbery. After they could not be located, the women were placed as additional members on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on October 17, six weeks after the Sterling Hall bombers.
Saxe was captured in March 1975 in her native Philadelphia; Power, removed from the Ten Most Wanted list in 1984, remained a ghost for twenty-three years, before surrendering to police in 1993, saying her conscience was tormenting her. She was convicted for her part in the armed robbery, has served her sentence and been released.
By their own admission, the FBI had no inkling of Kathy Power’s living as a fugitive in Oregon at the time she surrendered. Had she chosen, she could well still be living a life on the lam as, assuming he is still alive, Leo Burt is still doing after fifty-four years.
Here is the link to my write-up on Kathy Power.
The four bombers of the Sterling Hall building on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison were charged with the crime on September 3, 1970, the day of the death of legendary former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi.
In Green Bay, the learning of the names of the alleged bombers was nearly as big of news as the death of the biggest-named gridiron coach.
Only Topped By Lombardi’s Death
On the 1970s television sitcom Barney Miller, I have noticed wanted posters of real fugitives of the time period displayed on the bulletin board at the “Ol One-Two.”
In this shot, the wanted poster of Leo Burt is shown over the right should of Chano. I recall Burt’s wanted poster being pinned in Barney’s office in the some early season episodes as well.
Leo Burt’s Wanted Poster On Barney Miller
In this image, Sergeant Harris has a paper partially placed over the wanted poster of David Fine.
David Fine’s Wanted Poster On Barney Miller
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30325731/robert-e-fassnacht
SOURCES:
- America’s Most Wanted
- Chicago Tribune
- Herald-Times Reporter
- FBI
- Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
- New York Times
Those were tumbling times. I was at many demonstrations back then. The majority of them were peaceful until the police arrived swinging their batons and putting male and females in headlocks to carry them off to jail. The police were brutal, and it caused many protesters to fight back. Of course, there were some who came down to Chicago to try and start fights. You just stayed away from them. I think what these guys did was not to kill or hurt anyone as the building was suppose to be empty. It was horrible times for us that year.