The Last Fugitive (pdf file) - Wisconsin Alumni Association

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By Doug Moe ’79The tips started comingalmost immediately.On October 31, 1970, two monthsafter a bomb exploded outsideSterling Hall on the UW-Madisoncampus, a waitress in a restaurantin Cleveland, Ohio, thought one ofher customers was Leo Burt, one offour men wanted in connection withthe bombing. She had seen his faceon an FBI Ten Most Wanted poster.Later that night, the customer fromthe restaurant came out of a Clevelandmovie theater, where he had justwatched Easy Rider. As he started toopen his car door, several uniformedpolice officers approached, guns drawn,and told him to put his hands over hishead. An FBI agent approached himand said, “You’re being charged as afugitive from justice.”After an hour of questioning, authoritiesrealized that the man was a secondyearlaw student named RichardRoutman, and not a notorious fugitive.Today, Routman is an attorney inKansas, and every once in a while, hewonders whatever became of Leo Burt.In 2003, thirty-three years after thatHalloween night in Cleveland, FBI specialagent Kent Miller got a call fromDenver. Someone had tipped police thata homeless man in the area might beBurt. Miller, who had worked the Burtcase for fifteen years out of the bureau’sMadison office, compared a photographof the Denver man to age-enhancedimages of Burt the bureau had made.There were resemblances, although thehomeless man’s hair was longer.“He was real mysterious,” Millerrecalls. “He wouldn’t stay in the samehomeless shelter more than four or fivenights, wouldn’t tell anybody where hewas from.”The FBI enlisted an employee ofthe homeless shelter, who managed toretrieve a soda can the man had held.But the prints did not match. The homelessman was not Leo Burt.The tips keep coming, but they arealways wrong.This summer, thirty-five yearswill have passed since the August nightwhen four young radicals parked a vanfull of explosives in the driveway outsideSterling Hall. Targeted at the ArmyMath Research Center as a protestagainst U.S. involvement in the VietnamWar, the bomb killed Robert Fassnacht,a thirty-three-year-old postdoctoralresearcher in physics, and touched off anFBI manhunt for the bombers.Three men who carried out thebombing — erstwhile UW student KarletonArmstrong, his brother DwightArmstrong, and then-freshman DavidFine — were all eventually arrested,served time in prison, and have gotten onwith their lives. But their suspectedaccomplice, Leo Frederick Burt x’70,remains at large, making him perhaps thelast fugitive of the Vietnam era. Thousandsof tips have been investigated,hundreds of theories advanced, and themystery of Burt has only deepened.After he published Rads, his 1992book about the bombing, newspaperreporter Tom Bates MA’68, PhD’72thought he might hear from Burt. Whenhe didn’t, Bates grew even more fascinatedby the fugitive. In 1995, Bateswrote a long story for a newspaper inOregon, claiming Burt was theUnabomber, the domestic terrorist whokilled three people and injured dozensmore with bombs, usually mailed, from1978 to 1995. Bates based his claimlargely on similarities between theUnabomber’s “Manifesto,” which hadbeen recently published by the New YorkTimes and Washington Post, and an articlewritten by Burt for the left-wing journalLiberation after he disappeared into theunderground in 1972. There were strikingsimilarities in the prose, but the maneventually arrested as the Unabomberwas Ted Kaczynski, not Leo Burt.Through the years, there have beenrumors of sightings — in Norman, Oklahoma,in the early 1970s; in Algeria in1972; and in Costa Rica in 1990. Nonehave panned out. If anything, it is theutter lack of credible information onwhat has become of Burt that most distinguishesthe case.That’s what struck Allan Thompson,the Madison FBI agent who handled the“Leo simply disappeared.investigation prior to Miller, about thecase when I talked to him in 1995. “I didfugitive work for twenty-three years. Inevery case I worked, someone in thewoodwork knew where the person was.Family, friends — somebody,” he toldme. “With Burt, there was an intenseinvestigation of his parents and relatives.Nothing came of it. Not one iota or indicationin twenty-five years that he’s beensighted, heard from, or spoken to.”But if Leo Burt has vanished, theinterest in him has not. Joe Brennan, Jr.,a thirty-six-year-old student in the graduatewriting program at Johns HopkinsUniversity, is currently revising a lengthymanuscript about Burt, with the workingtitle The Last Radical. Brennan’s interestin Burt comes from his father, who was aclassmate and rowing teammate of Burtat Monsignor Bonner High School inPennsylvania. Brennan thinks Burt’supbringing, and especially his involvementin rowing, is critical to understandingwhat happened in August 1970 andperhaps the years since.Burt was born April 18, 1948, into amiddle-class, Catholic Philadelphia family.He and his six siblings grew up in abrick bungalow, across the street from acemetery. Leo was an altar boy, and Fridaydinners in the Burt home were fishSUMMER 2005 29
In 1970, Burt joined fellowradicals (from left) KarletonArmstrong, DwightArmstrong, and David Fineas part of the New Year’sGang, which vowed towreak havoc on operationsit saw as complicit in theVietnam War. The bomb atSterling Hall did little damageto its intended target,the U.S. Army MathResearch Center, but killeda researcher who wasworking inside the building.Burt’s co-conspiratorsall have been captured andsentenced for their roles inthe attack.UPI/BETTMANNor meatless spaghetti. He was a decentstudent, but it was crew — a widely popularsport around Philadelphia in thosedays — that interested him most. “Thecentral thing in his life was rowing,” saysBrennan.A number of East Coast universitieswanted Burt to row for them, but hechose Wisconsin, which under coachRandy Jablonic ‘60 had established itselfas one of the best crew programs in thecountry. “He went to Madison solely tobe part of the men’s rowing team,” Brennansays. “He wanted to be with the best.It was a fateful decision.”Fateful because while Burt enjoyedsome success in his first year rowing inMadison, the hard reality was that at fivefeet, eleven inches tall, he was shorterthan the raw, big-boned kids Jablonicfavored. It was physics: a tall man canmove a boat faster than a shorter one.Burt’s experience and his intensity —remarked on by all who knew him —carried him for a time. He could outworkanyone and became a weight room legend.Yet by his junior year, with the Badgersscheduled for a big race out east,Burt was dropped from the travelingsquad. While he didn’t quit then, hebegan to clash with Jablonic, and whenthe coach told him to get a haircut, Burtcleaned out his locker.“His whole life was being a varsityrower,” Brennan says. “It left a hugehole.”Tim Mickelson ’71, a rower originallyfrom Deerfield, Wisconsin, may havebeen Burt’s best friend on the team, havingspent the summer of 1968 with Burtand his family in Pennsylvania, wherethey trained for Olympic trials and thecoming season. Mickelson remembersBurt as someone who never fought andrarely argued with anyone, even in thesometimes heated and competitiveatmosphere of the locker room. “NeverThe others rememberedBurt weeping in theback of the car whenthe radio delivered thenews a man had died.But then DwightArmstrong sensed achange. He lookedat Burt and thought,“He’s cold as steel.”swore, never told a dirty joke, never hada date, as far as I know,” Mickelsonrecalls. “It was rowing and studies. Leowas a good, but not great, student, andhe studied a lot.”When Burt left the team, he andMickelson remained friends, while seeingeach other less. “He let his hair grow andstarted writing a lot for the Daily Cardinaland SDS [Students for a DemocraticSociety],” Mickelson says. “At somepoint, he started believing what he waswriting.”Political activism was hard to avoidon campus in 1969. Two years earlier,student demonstrations against the DowChemical company had erupted intobloody riots. After he left the crew,Burt’s circle refocused around DailyCardinal reporters and the anti-waractivists he met while covering protests.He forged friendships with Fine andKarl Armstrong. “It became another culture,like rowing, for him to immersehimself in,” Brennan says.In the spring of 1970, when newsbroke that the National Guard had shotfour students during a protest at KentState University, the already edgy UW-Madison campus erupted. While coveringa melee between police and studentson Bascom Hill, Burt was beaten bypolice. And with that, he was no longeran observer.Over beers at the Nitty Gritty, Burttalked politics and revolution with theArmstrong brothers and Fine. “It was achance to be part of something biggerthan himself, yet be a big part of it himself,”says Brennan. Their discussionsturned to the Army Math ResearchCenter, which had recently received a$1.8 million contract from the U.S.Department of Defense, and they startedto plot. Something had to be done.30 ON WISCONSIN
Page 1: The Last FugitiveThirty-five years
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