Orgone Research

I was born in 1962, seven years after my brother Paul Evan Crowley. I have no other siblings. I could never relate to my brother while I was growing up, in any sort of way. I assumed this was simply due to the big age difference. As I got older, I came to believe there was far more going on with my brother to account for his coldness to me. When I was a child, my mother claimed that when my brother and I were both adults we would become the best of friends. That never happened. Why not?

Unfortunately one of the defining characteristics for both my brother and me was that we were “uptight”. My brother had it much worse than I did, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reverse the bad programming that makes me “uptight”. I see the same pattern in a lot of clever people; the same mental talents that are expressed in strong verbal skills are tied in with anxiety. If you begin to define yourself as different from, or superior to, other human beings due to verbal skills, then your life becomes a constant struggle to maintain this self-imagined superiority. I think this struggle was at the root of the anxiety that infected my brother and me.

My brother had other demons. He was most likely a heavily closeted homosexual. This is understandably a strong claim, and one I don’t make lightly. He never married, nor ever had any girlfriends or female dates, as far as I know. As clearly as I can remember, only three friends of his ever come over to our house. I know for a fact that two of them were gay. One of them, Tracy, became wealthy through ownership of Missoula and Portland porn stores.

I always liked Tracy, and ran into him in Seattle some years back. I even visited him in Portland somewhere in the late 1980’s. I asked Tracy if he ever had any sexual contact with my brother and he told me he did not. I believe him. This suggested to me that my brother was attracted to gay men, but was unwilling to follow through.

My brother never developed any of the stereotypical Montana hobbies such as hunting, fishing, hiking, or skiing. His aesthetic tastes ran to the French language and gourmet cooking. He would speak privately to my mother in the stereotypically “gay male” manner, yet with everyone else it was rigid, clipped, and over-enunciated.

Now at this juncture, lest I be accused of being insensitive to gays, let me state flat out that I have no problem with anyone being gay, my brother included. I suspect that if my brother could have come to terms with his own sexuality, he would have been a much happier person. Why was he unable to come out?

Probably because he was a hard-core Christian.

When one thinks of hard-core Christians, one usually thinks of fundamentalists. Strangely my brother was actually a Lutheran… As well as his religion, most of his social life revolved around his church activities.

I started out as a Lutheran myself, but I was always lukewarm. I attended Sunday school, but never studied the Bible. By the time I was confirmed, I had become more cynical about attending church services, and found them deathly boring.

I eventually became an atheist when I was about a junior in high school. This caused a major rift between me and my mother, who was also a Lutheran. Atheism was also the final cleft between my brother and me. Whereas before he was simply cold to me, now he decided to exhibit “good Christian love” by completely shunning me.

I moved to Seattle when I graduated from college in 1987. When I would return to Missoula to visit I would usually receive just a perfunctory “hello” from my brother, and that was it.

My brother was totally consumed with academic success. I think he made it through Hellgate High school with more or less a straight “A” average. He graduated with high honors in three majors from the University of Montana in fours years! He went on to get his Masters degree from Georgetown University. He then started working on his PhD. At this point his history becomes unclear to me.

He taught high school French in either Helena or Bozeman or both. This puzzled me, as I thought getting a PhD pretty much excluded having a simultaneous full time job. Between 1987 and 1997 I would ask my mother how Paul’s PhD was coming along, and I would get vague, dissembling answers.

Then things got strange. At one point my mother shared an odd anecdote with me. She said that Paul had befriended a cop in Bozeman who had taken Paul out for some recreational handgun target shooting. Sounds like healthy fun to me but knowing my brother, this was grossly atypical! The strange upshot of the story was that my mother included the detail that my brother had experienced a “falling out” with the police officer…

I imagine it goes without saying, but my parents were of the old school persuasion whereby any sort of discussion of human sexuality was utterly anathema. Montana at the time had sodomy laws on the books, the penalty being 10 years, a 10,000 dollar fine, or both. To this day I can’t bring myself to broach the subject of Paul’s lifestyle to my father…

Missoula, Montana is a divided place; being a liberal arts college town, it became a left wing Mecca within a right-wing redneck state. Attitudes toward gays are still in the dark ages for a large part of the populace. Virtually every night that I would walk across the Higgins Avenue Bridge in Missoula rednecks would yell “hey faggot” out the windows of their cars or trucks. No, I’m not exaggerating; this didn’t happen just once or twice, this was ALL THE TIME.

So I have sympathy for my brother in this way; he grew up in a sex-negative family environment, in a homophobic state where gay sex was a crime, with a hard-core religious mindset.

There is a particular attitude seen in a lot of gay men; a sort of free-wheeling haughtiness and superiority, especially toward straight men. I’ve had gay men tell me TO MY FACE that gays are “vastly cooler” than straight men. You see this when gay men accuse other gay men of being “bitchy queens”. The problem is that they can’t perceive the same haughtiness in themselves.

My brother had this in spades. An absolutely pathological, haughty self-righteousness. Couple this with a world class anal retentive personality and you have an unsympathetic character, to say the least.

When I visited my parents in 1997, I was told that my brother had fucked up his back, and was unable to work. He had moved back in with my parents, and was living in my old bedroom in the basement. This situation didn’t seem too outrageous, as he had gained a great deal of weight, which I assumed factored into back problems.

One day in late January 2006, I got a message from my father on my phone answering machine. My brother had died.

As soon as I spoke to my father, I asked him what Paul had died of. Shockingly, I was told he had died of liver failure, secondary to chronic alcohol abuse! Furthermore, I was advised that Paul had actually lost his job due to alcoholism, thus necessitating the move back to my parent’s house.

My parents were total alcohol abstainers. There was never any alcohol use in the house except for one party thrown for a bunch of my father’s legal associates. But I started drinking when I got to college, and stopped in early 1998. I totally understand the attraction alcohol has to someone afflicted with anxiety. I still struggle with anxiety, and I have absolutely no doubt my brother did too, and undoubtedly his struggle was far worse than mine. I keep a copy of my brother’s death certificate on the bulletin board beside me. Morbid? Perhaps, but it helps remind me to be healthy and happy in the here and now.

My point in all this retrospective rambling is simple: human sexuality cannot be bottled up, it must be allowed to express itself in healthy ways or really fucked-up, pathological things happen to people. Being a “closet case” is not a trivial matter. Religious fervor is no substitute for coming out.

My first rock and roll record was Waterloo, by Abba. A 45, of course, and inexpensive enough that my mother was willing to buy it for me. This must have been about 1974, and I would have been about 12 at the time. I never had summer jobs as a child, and not much of an allowance, so I depended on the good graces of my mother for little luxuries. She had grown up in the Great Depression, and she often reminded me of the deprivations she experienced. Later on I was allowed to buy Cher’s Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, and I think Ringo Starr’s Photograph. Terry Jack’s Seasons in the Sun was in my collection. So far, so good. But then a subtle shift occurred when I got The Night Chicago Died by Paper Lace. This time my mother expressed to me that she found the music a little bit “hard” or perhaps “coarse”.

My mother was a Lutheran, though she didn’t talk too much about religion back in those days. She was not one of those stereotypical Christians who thought rock music was the music of the Devil. Rather she was more of the elitist snob, who felt that The One True Music was classical. But she had a weakness for schlock, and owned records by the Tijuana Brass and Bert Kaempfert. We even had Whipped Cream and Other Delights in our house! She watched Lawrence Welk with some degree of reverence.

Young people today may not appreciate the intensity of the “generation gap” that many people my age experienced growing up. Long hair and rock music were not just part of the maelstrom of popular culture like they are today. For many people back then they were extremely potent and divisive symbols.

A strange and sadly comedic episode occurred at the Crowley house one day, as my mother complained that rock music was intrinsically inferior because “you couldn’t understand the words”. True enough for some songs, but the lyrics she couldn’t understand were those to The Night Chicago Died. The specific line was “and I asked someone who said, ‘bout a hundred cops are dead”. I heard the word “cops” fairly clearly, but my mother couldn’t. She enlisted my brother, whom she claimed had very acute hearing. My brother listened carefully, and pronounced that Paper Lace was singing “cubs”.

Yes, the word “cubs” made absolutely no sense at all. But bigger conflicts and stranger interpretations were to come. Not surprisingly this began for me with puberty and high school. I remember reading in Skateboarder magazine in about 1977 or 78 that some particularly cool skateboarder liked “Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Hendrix”. By this time, I had been given a hand-me-down 8-track player. I scraped up enough money to buy Led Zeppelin’s Presence. It was immediately obvious that this was something vastly cooler and more profound than Cher, Abba, or Paper Lace. I became a life-long fan of hard rock.

Unfortunately my new-found appreciation of hard rock deeply conflicted with my mother’s growing disdain for it. I was allowed to own the records and listen to them, but was subjected to her constant and irrational arguments.

Somewhere around 1980, I discovered the book Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key. It made quite an impact on me. Unfortunately though, my critical thinking skills at the time were in a nascent stage. Certain concepts struck me as plausible, but Key’s analysis of rock music seemed farfetched, even then. I seem to remember reading about George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord, as the background vocals clearly say “Hare Krishna”, “Krishna, Krishna” and related lines.

I remembered that my mother had this song on a 45 disk; she bought it because it was a Good Christian Song. To tell the truth, I don’t think I had listened to the song very critically until I read Key’s analysis. I put the record on, and sure enough, the Krishna stuff was there, plain as day!

My mother had a bad habit of promoting a particular logical fallacy, namely that superior perceptual capacity is equivalent to superior ability to discern value. The problem is that “value” is a metaphysical concept, an arbitrary human invention, not the subject of science or mathematics. In fact this is the core conundrum of all aesthetic thinking; at best one can argue meaningfully about whether concepts are logically consistent, but you can’t point to a “good” in the universe like you can point to a chunk of aluminium.

My mother claimed that she had once taken something called the “Seashore Test” and had done particularly well. It was an audiology test. Now I have no doubt that audiology is a genuine science, and that meaningful data can be gathered. There are plenty of perceptual tests in psychology that are grounded in good science. I didn’t doubt my mother’s claim. So I was curious how she would react when I told her that My Sweet Lord was really about Krishna. Payback time!

At first I just told her. Understandably she didn’t believe me, so we went into the living room and put on the record. At first I couldn’t believe my mother couldn’t hear (or perceive) the background vocals. I think I put the record on again, this time lip-syncing along with the “Krishna, Krishna” vocals.

Unbelievably, my mother still couldn’t hear it! At this point I had one of the first epiphanies of my life. I realized there were only three logical possibilities. The first was that she genuinely couldn’t hear it. I don’t think this was the case; she was not hard of hearing. It wasn’t as if the sounds were at 16,000 Hz and too high to hear, or super-faint. The background vocals are clear and obvious.

The second possibility was that she was lying to me. I don’t believe this either, though I must accept it as a possibility. My parents were both profoundly moral people. Our family never “joshed” each other, never “told stories” even if they were revealed as such later, and absolutely never bullshitted each other. It was a very rigid upbringing emotionally, and very much out of step with the rest of the world.

No, what I think was really going on with my mother was that she was in denial. Clearly the situation was too much for her; for the first time in our series of never-ending musical arguments I was absolutely and unequivocally correct. Her vaunted perceptual skills had failed her, and rather spectacularly so. And I’m sure it shocked her that what she thought was Christian was really Krishna!

Of course she had to come up with some kind of rationalization; “There’s too much noise” or “You can’t understand what they are saying”. Frankly I don’t remember what it was…

This was the first time I had seen a human behave like this, and it happened to be my mother. It came as a shock to me, and I began to feel bad that I had hurt or confused my mother in some deep, dark, and strange way.

As I grew older, I became much more of a skeptic about all sorts of things. Skeptics see the kind of denial that my mother exhibited all the time. Evidence for extraordinary claims is scrutinized, and sometimes it’s clearly shown to have a prosaic explanation. For most people it becomes like that old V8 Juice slogan; “I could have had a V8”. When you see the prosaic explanation, you think, “Oh my goodness, that’s so simple, how could we have possibly believed it was evidence for Bigfoot/Orbs/Ghosts/ESP, etc”. Yet there will ALWAYS be true believers who madly cling to the original belief.

The hardest lesson that I take away from the My Sweet Lord episode is that intelligence does not guarantee good judgment. I could see that early on with my mother, and as the years go by, I see it in myself.

I was something of a “pyro” as a child. Back in the 1960’s, this was nothing particularly unusual. Most of my friends played with plastic toys, and we all quickly discovered that they would burn in interesting ways if combined with common household products like Lysol disinfectant spray, WD40, lighter fluid, or just good old fashioned gasoline. Certain kinds of plastic would stay alight by itself, particularly polyethylene or polypropylene. Toy models were made of styrene, which would burn, but with a nasty, sooty flame.

My interest in fire took a great leap forward by discovering that Potassium Nitrate was an effective and easily obtainable oxidizer. I learned this from watching the Star Trek episode “Arena”, in which Captain Kirk defeats his reptilian monster adversary, the Gorn, using an improvised cannon. The propellant used was crude black powder. Spock moves the story along by advising the TV audience that the mysterious white powder is Potassium Nitrate. From there, I think I looked up “gunpowder” in either the Encyclopedia Britannica, or my brother’s “junior” Encyclopedia Britannica. Gunpowder was dead easy to make as far as proportions go; 75% Potassium Nitrate, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur.

Now here comes the part that I’m sure some will find hard to believe: Both the Potassium Nitrate and the Sulfur were sold at the local drug store! Indeed, they sat on the shelf, side by side. To this day, I’m not entirely sure what the “legitimate” use is for Potassium Nitrate, and this is somewhat embarrassing, having been a pharmacist! My best guess is for burning stumps, but it might have some sort of veterinary use… But suffice it to say that back in 1972 Skaggs drug store, located in a strip mall on Brooks Street in Missoula did indeed sell the stuff.

About this time, my friend Steve brought into the fourth grade class a “science experiment” which consisted of a block of wood, a steel food can, a charcoal briquette, and some lighter fluid. To this day, I’m not sure what the point of the “experiment” was, but he was allowed to light his fire in the classroom and let it burn away. During the question and answer portion of his demonstration, I bragged that I knew the formula for gunpowder. I could sense that Steve and I had a mutual interest in burning things.

A bit of nastiness ensued when Steve went to put the flame out. He put his head directly over the flame coming out of the steel can, and blew straight down. The flame had nowhere to go but up, and went right into Steve’s face, singing and burning off his eyebrows.

From there, Steve and I rode our bikes out to Skaggs, and bought our Potassium Nitrate and Sulfur. Indeed, two 9 or 10 year old children buying two of the components of black powder was NO BIG DEAL. No one ever stopped us, or questioned us. Such was life back in Montana in the early 1970’s…

Steve and I made crude black powder on numerous occasions. Looking back, we did one thing very right, and one thing very wrong. The right thing is that we never contained our incendiary mixture.  To this day, I have 10 fingers, 10 toes, and two eyes. I think we had an intuitive sense not to “go there”. The spectacle of fire and voluminous smoke was enough to keep us entertained. This was all done right in Steve’s back yard, and his neighbors never seemed to notice or complain…The one thing we did very wrong was grinding our three part mixture together using a mortar and pestle. This is a gigantic no-no, as the components should be ground separately then ever so gently mixed together.

I lost touch with Steve after high school, but I understand he went on to become a lawyer. Our pyro experiments together came and went.

But you can’t keep something fun like this a secret forever, and soon my friend Mike and I were at it. At first we set off our incendiary mixtures in an alleyway a block or two from Mike’s house, but we soon realized that we should obtain much more privacy for this sort of thing. We took our pyromania to Hellgate Canyon, specifically a talus slope just to the west of the Milwaukee railroad tracks on the east slope of Mt. Sentinel. With nothing but rocks all around, there was no chance of catching anything on fire.

Again, at this point, we did not contain our mixtures. We were simply trying to optimize our big flames, and not make genuine bombs. As with Steve, this phase with Mike and me came and went. But by high school, something novel entered the picture, namely Paladin Press. I don’t remember how I learned about Paladin Press, probably an ad in the back of a magazine. I ordered their catalog, which was delivered to my house. One book in particular stuck out. This was “George Hayduke’s” original Get Even. By this time Mike and I were seniors in high school. We ordered the book, and found it endlessly amusing. Hayduke included a recipe for a “smoke bomb” which was to melt together potassium nitrate and ordinary sugar. Thankfully Mike and I had enough common sense to realize that this procedure was best done outdoors. Mike bought an electric hot plate, and indeed if you added heat slowly, the sucrose would caramelize together with the Potassium Nitrate to create a brown solid. Sugar was much cheaper than sulfur, and obviously more available.

But by this time we were about 18, and we were ready to kick it up a notch. Somewhere along the line we had obtained genuine green water-resistant fuse, which made our operations much safer and more reliable. We just had to start containing our incendiary mixtures.

I think Mike and I started out with simple cardboard or even paper tubes, stuffed with our sugar “smoke bomb” mixture. Indeed, crude as it was, the stuff would explode if confined.

At some point, the critical decision was made: We had to make a real pipe bomb. We obtained the obligatory iron pipe and two threaded caps. I think it was probably a 6” by 2” pipe. Again, we made a crucial mistake, in that we poured our incendiary mixture directly into the pipe then screwed the threaded cap on. This was a bad idea, because in theory the friction of the cap against the pipe could create a spark. We should have contained our mixture in a plastic bag before putting in the pipe. But at least we were cautious about our fuse length. It must have been 3 feet long!

Mike and I took our “IED” as they are now called, to our Mt. Sentinel talus slope. We went higher up the slope this time, and found a sort of “corner” indentation in the mountainside. To make things more interesting, we piled on several hundred pounds of rocks on top of the bomb. Being that the bomb was placed in a crevasse of sorts, we were able to get behind it, in the sense that there was a significant part of the mountain between where we placed the bomb and where we hid, waiting for detonation.

We lit the fuse. We scrambled to our hiding spot. I covered my ears; I don’t remember if Mike did or not. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, both because we used such a long section of fuse and because of the psychological tension of the moment. And then it went off.

The only way I can describe the sound is like this; if you think of a firecracker as sounding like a snare drum, then our bomb was like a John Bonham bass drum. The blast wave traveled across the Clark Fork River, across Hellgate Canyon, echoed off Mt. Jumbo and came back to us.

Mike and I went to investigate. Certain rocks that weighed perhaps 50 or more pounds had been blown 30 or 40 feet down the hill. But the pipe was still there! Indeed, one cap was still threaded on, although a chunk at the end about the size of a 50 cent piece had been blown out. We hunted around, and amazingly found the other end cap!

Now here is where the story becomes rather fantastic, and I understand if some people don’t believe me, but I guarantee it’s true. Both the male threads on the pipe and the female threads on the cap were more or less undamaged! The only way I can conceive of how this might have occurred is that the gas pressure expanded the cap more than the pipe and literally lifted the cap’s threads over the pipe’s threads. I could almost thread the cap back onto the pipe by hand, but not quite. Mike and I marveled at this strange phenomenon for some time, but eventually decide that we must rid ourselves of this incriminating evidence, and so we threw the pipe and cap into the Clark Fork River.

At this point I had a decision to make. What we had just done was big time fun, but deep down I knew that to keep going in this direction would likely lead to one of two outcomes; being arrested by the police, or blowing myself up.

Yes, I’ve played with firecrackers and bottle rockets since then, but I’ve never again made a genuine “bomb”. I guess for me making one functional pipe bomb was enough, and served as something of a rite of passage.

Mike and I stayed in touch throughout college, mostly by drinking on the weekends. He went on to law school, and currently practices law in Montana.

Sunday night, June 12 1983, at around 11:20 p.m. I was walking eastbound on 3rd street in Missoula Montana. I turned right at the South end of the Higgins Ave Bridge, and started walking Southbound on Higgins. This was the end of finals week at the University of Montana, and a Sunday night, so the downtown area was mostly barren of students, who would have compromised the majority of people downtown that night.

Suddenly I heard a huge “boom”, which came from downtown, on the other end of the Higgins Ave Bridge from me. Believe it or not, I didn’t think too much of it at the time, as I figured it might be an M-80 or some such tossed out the window of a pickup truck by some redneck from Dillon as he sped away from Missoula. I continued walking Southbound, and got a block or so before I began to hear numerous emergency vehicle sirens blasting. Suddenly I became interested! I turned around and ran Northbound across the bridge, and soon came upon the scene at the corner of Higgins and Broadway. Even though I waited several minutes, I was still one of the first civilians on the scene, as the police had just cordoned off the area with plastic tape.

A small sedan was in the Northbound lane of Higgins at Broadway, blown apart. The driver was obviously dead, being blown about halfway out of his car. His legs were still inside, but his upper torso was hanging out the driver’s door.

Soon I was joined by my friend Mike, who had been playing cards at the Oxford. We walked around the area, outside of the police perimeter. We began to notice tissue from the victim. Mike declared it was brain, but brain is characteristically gray, and shaped kind of like macaroni. No, this was adipose tissue; human fat. Yellow and runny, with blood included.

We walked around the area for a while, gawking. But then what else could you do but just go home? It wasn’t too late in the evening to expect that the event would be covered the next day in the Missoulian, the local paper.

Indeed, the front page of the Missoulian Monday, June 13 1983 included this story:

As you can tell, the original text is virtually unreadable, being that it was scanned onto microfilm, then printed out at the public library, then re-scanned by me. Here is a transcription of the story:

Blast in car kills 1

By Mike McInally and Laurie Mason of the Missoulian

A man was killed late Sunday night when the car he was sitting in exploded with a fury at the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Broadway Street.

The man – who was apparently killed immediately  -  had not been identified as of 12:30 a.m. Monday, about one hour after the explosion.

No one else was apparently hurt. Police on the scene were sure that some sort of explosive device had detonated in the car as it sat in the northbound lane of Higgins. But they were uncertain what sort of explosives were involved.

The explosion tore out the inside of the car, a brown Ford Maverick with Ravalli County plates. The roof was found about 100 feet behind the car on Higgins. The rear of the car was intact, and its hazard lights were blinking.

The windshield was found almost a block in front of the car.

The sound of the explosion could be heard for blocks.

Dan Norman, 34, was standing around the corner on Pine Street when he heard what he thought was a sonic boom just before 11:30 p.m.

Then he heard people screaming.

“I ran around the corner to see. There were a lot of hysterical people there at the time,” he said.

“Within two minutes the fire truck was there. The police were there in in three.”

“One very dead person was laying just outside the driver’s door. It was very gory, with about half his clothes blown off.”

There was an acrid smell in the air, like gunpowder.

The car, he said, “looked like someone had lifted the top off like a sardine can.”

Officers cordoned off the area and removed for questioning people who said they saw the explosion. Emergency vehicles clogged the intersection of Broadway and Higgins.

Norman, a self-employed Missoula salesman, said he was in the area because he wanted to get a newspaper off the press.

Another witness said he saw the explosion from about a block away, at the intersection of Main Street and Higgins.

Before the explosion, the witnesses said, the car was stopped at the intersection, with its hazard lights flashing.

The lights were still flashing when emergency personnel arrived at the scene.

Another witness said he was in the bus depot, on Broadway, when he heard the explosion.

“It sounded like this whole side of town blew up,” he said.

Medic 5 ambulance removed the body to the Missoula County Morgue.

As of 12:30 a.m., police were still on the scene of the explosion, gathering and marking evidence.

(photo caption) Officials examine the remains of a vehicle destroyed in an explosion late Sunday at the corner of Higgins Avenue and Broadway Street. The driver of the vehicle died in the blast.

Photo credit; Curt Walters.

Wow! What an utterly violent, anomalous, and unexpected event, especially for a town the size of Missoula. I did what everyone else did, which was wait for more news. Was this a suicide? Was the victim a contract killer, and his bomb went off accidentally? Was he the victim of a bizarre and calculated homicide? Was it a “time bomb”, or was the bomb remotely detonated, perhaps chosen for this very central location. Was this a mafia hit? Was the guy a “mad scientist” type, whose experiment went horribly awry? Any one of these explanations was sensational in and of itself.

Indeed, the next day’s Missoulian had more details, and on the front page of course:

Vehicle blast remains under investigation

Missoula police Monday had many questions – but few answers about the Sunday -night explosion that killed an Anaconda  man and gutted the car he was sitting in at a downtown intersection.

Edward Ellsworth Curry, a 48-year -old former smelter worker, was killed instantly in the explosion , which ripped off the top of the car, a Ford Maverick with Ravalli County license plates.

Police were still uncertain that sort of explosives were involved. But it was clear, they said, that the explosion  had come from the car’s passenger compartment.

In an attempt to piece together the cause of the explosion, police were going over the car inch by inch. And an autopsy was performed on Curry’s body Monday afternoon. Officials hoped that the autopsy would shed some light on the type of explosive used.

It was tedious work. But it is a case that could hinge on the smallest detail.

A law-enforcement officer not involved in the investigation speculated that the blast must have had the force of about three sticks of dynamite to achieve the effect it did.

An agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – a bureau with expertise in explosives – was assisting in the investigation Monday.

According to Lt. James Oberhofer, police had not been able to determine whether the explosion was a homicide, a suicide, or an accident.

But there were indications that the homicide theory was not being given the same weight as the other two theories.

Missoula County Attorney Robert L. Deschamps III said no inquest into the death had been scheduled.

Deschamps said an inquest would not be called unless “something develops that suggests foul play.”

If the accident theory prevails, police will want to know why Curry was carrying explosives in the car.

Police said they did not know why Curry was in Missoula on Sunday night. There was also no certain explanation why Curry was driving a car with Ravalli County plates.

Anaconda-Deer Lodge Police Chief Jim Connors said Monday that Curry had no criminal record and no reputation as a troublemaker.

A neighbor of Curry’s, Warren David, described him as a man who kept to himself, but was well-liked by his close neighbors.

Union-members estimated Curry worked at the smelter for about five years. They said they could remember little about him.

Wire services Monday reported rumors than (sic) Curry was somehow connected to an alleged extortion attempt aimed at the Safeway store in Hamilton. Connors said later in the day that no evidence supported those rumors.

Connors said that the rumors had been circulating in Anaconda and that he did not know how they began. Reached by telephone Monday night, Curry’s wife, Sandra, vigorously denied the rumors. She declined to comment further.

A regional officer for Safeway in Spokane, Jim Beavers, said there had been an extortion attempt at the Hamilton store. But Beavers also declined further comment, saying the matter had been turned over to the FBI.

Curry was born in Iowa City, Iowa, on Feb. 11 1935, and has been a resident of Anaconda for 12 years. He had also lived in Hamilton and in California. He had been employed by the Anaconda Minerals Co. as a foreman and in Peru for the South American Copper Co.

More recently he was employed by Sach and Lawler Novelty Items in Colorado.

He was a veteran of the U.S. Marines, and was a sergeant in the Korean War. He was a member of the Anaconda Catholic community.

Survivors include his wife, Sandra Brill Curry, Anaconda: one son, Bryan Curry, Hamilton: a daughter, Bridget Curry, Davis, Calif., stepchildren, Konnie, Darren, Gregg, Leslisa, Marilyn and Matthew Bessler, all of Powell Wyo.: and parents, Mrs. (sic) and Mrs. O.W. Curry, Hamilton.

Mass of the Resurrection for Curry will be celebrated at 2 p.m. Wednesday in St. peter’s Church, Anaconda.

Longfellow Finnegan Funeral Home, Anaconda, is in charge of arrangements.

Well, at this point the intrigued individual like myself still has questions. At least the story puts a human face on the victim, as he had a wife and family.

You can see how multiple law enforcement agencies are now becoming involved; Missoula police, Anaconda police, the FBI, and the ATF. Would this hinder a smooth investigation?

No mention is yet made if any sort of containment of the explosives occurred. Was this the classic “pipe” bomb? If the explosive was ordinary gunpowder, it could be set off with a simple fuse, but that would make it an obvious suicide. If the explosives were “high” explosives, they would still require a blasting cap, which would need an electric current to initiate. If initial witness observations were correct, the hazard lights were flashing on the vehicle before the blast occurred. Could this have been coupled to the detonation? Yet this again points to suicide, unless Curry made an egregious error in hitting his hazard lights. Was he turning onto Broadway from Higgins? Did he hit his hazard lights instead of his turn indicator? It’s of course also possible that the witnesses were mistaken about what events preceded what, as this is common in abrupt and unexpected events.

For a bit of perspective, here is a photograph I took in September 2008 of a car in the position that Curry’s was in at the time of the explosion. My memory is that Curry’s car was in the left lane, but I’m not positive of that. This perspective is looking north on Higgins, with Broadway as the cross street:

Another view of the Intersection; looking east on Broadway with Higgins as the cross street. The red sedan is in the location of Curry’s vehicle:

We awaited more newspaper stories. The next day’s story was off the front page, and now appeared in the “local” section:

Car blast clues sought

By Mike McInally of the Missoulian

Investigators on Tuesday continued to piece together  the Sunday-night explosion that ripped apart a car in downtown Missoula and killed its occupant but answers proved elusive.

Although officials have not yet determined what explosives caused the blast, they are beginning to believe that dynamite was not involved. Investigators have been unable to find traces of paper in the car’s wreckage – paper that would have been used to wrap sticks of dynamite.

The explosion at the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Broadway Street killed Edward Curry, 48, of Anaconda. The inside of Curry’s car – a brown Ford Maverick with Ravalli County license plates  – was gutted.

The explosion scattered pieced of the automobile over Higgins Avenue, and windows in the Montana Building – at the corner of Higgins and Broadway – were shattered.

The car belonging to Curry – an Anaconda resident – but was registered to the address of his parents in Hamilton.

On Tuesday, city police and an agent from the Federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms went over the car, using tweezers to pull out possible pieces of evidence. FBI agents also are assisting with the investigation, said police Lt. James Oberhofer.

Evidence found in the search – along with evidence found in a five hour autopsy performed Monday on Curry – will be examined by an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory in Californian. Police may not know what the explosive was until the results of those tests are in.

Also on Tuesday, police were unable to say whether the incident was an accident, a suicide, or a homicide. But they said, the homicide theory was not being given the same weight  as the other two theories. And no new evidence has surfaced that might add credence to the homicide theory.

And – assuming that the incident was an accident – police said they do not know yet why the explosives were in Curry’s car or why the explosives detonated. They admitted Tuesday that they might never have the answers to those questions.

“We’re hoping that the lab can give us something.” said city police detective Scott Graham. “It’s like an arson case.” he said, “in that you work your way back to the point and then get what you can.”

“Whatever hit that car wasn’t a firecracker,” he added later. Police have ruled out the possibility that the explosion was caused by any failure of the car’s mechanical system.

Well, this is still not getting to the bottom of the mystery. No doubt chemical analysis would be performed on the car or Curry’s body, or both to determine the nature of the explosive. As far as dynamite goes, other kinds of common explosives use different kinds of containment. I remember taking a “fires and explosives” class way back in college, and seeing plastic cases that contained ammonium nitrate. I believe nitromethane and a blasting cap was added to arm the explosive.

Again, no mention is made of any kind of containment of the explosive. Would you drive down the street with a brick of C4 in the passenger seat?

As you might imagine, the local rumor mill began to become active. The best rumor I heard was from a cab driver friend of mine. He claimed to have heard that there was a roll of dimes between the explosive and Curry, and that Curry’s body was riddled with dimes…

Even if the explosion was an accident, it doesn’t answer the question as to what Curry intended to do with the explosives. What he had obviously goes way beyond the youthful lets-put-some-dry-ice-in-a-pop-bottle-and-watch-it-blow-up kind of prank. At 48 years old, it’s safe to assume that Curry was well beyond blowing up stuff for simple recreation, though you can never really rule out something like this out… What was he going to do with the stuff…?

And now we come to the final Missoulian story on this strange saga. The story is again off the front page and in the “Community” section. As far as I know, the following article dated Thursday June 16 1983 is the last one about Curry’s car bomb.

Blast called accident

By Mike McInally of the Missoulian

Police said Wednesday that they are increasingly inclined to believe that an explosion that tore apart a car and killed its occupant Sunday night was an accident.

Police again emphasized, however, that their inclination was just speculation. They said that they had not been able to definitely rule out the other possibilities -  that the explosion was a suicide of a homicide.

But, they said, they have not been able to find evidence to indicate foul play. And the evidence for suicide is also skimpy.

The explosion, at the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Broadway, killed 48-year-old Edward Curry of Anaconda. It gutted the car he was in, a Ford Maverick, which was sitting in the northbound land of Higgins.

Curry’s funeral was held Wednesday in Anaconda. In another development Wednesday, Anaconda Deer Lodge Police Chief Jim Connors said that police had found blasting caps Tuesday at Curry’s home.

Connors said the caps could be used with either a plastic explosive or dynamite and would require an electronic detonating device.

He said that the caps have been sent to the state crime lab in Missoula for testing.

Connors said his department is still working with Missoula authorities on the case.

But those Missoula officials said Wednesday that they’ve interviewed just about al the witnesses they can find in the city.

Most of those interviews, according to Lt. James Oberhofer, were conducted with people who either saw or heard the explosion at 11:20 p.m. Sunday.

And, he said, police may now have to wait for results of laboratory tests before they make any progress on the case. He said he did not know how long those tests would take.

The tests also may provide police with a clue as to what sort of explosive device was involved. Investigators have been unable to find residue typically associated with a dynamite blast, leading to their hunch that dynamite was not involved.

Police said that federal agents are continuing to investigate the case.

Toby Harding, the FBI agent in charge of operations in Montana and Idaho, said Wednesday that the agency is interested in the case. But, he said the agency with primary responsibility for bombing incidents is the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

That bureau is part of the Department of the Treasury. An ATF agent helped city police go through the wreckage of the car, piece by piece, Tuesday.

Well, there you have it, slim pickings for anyone interested in what really happened. This bit is interesting:

But, they said, they have not been able to find evidence to indicate foul play. How can a guy possessing blasting caps and the equivalent of 3 sticks of dynamite in his car not be involved in “foul play” either sooner or later! If they guy was an old time miner, blasting out hard rock, I could see it, but there is no indication here that Curry was a miner.

So for me as a former Missoulian, who saw this incident when it happened, the newspaper coverage never left any kind of resolution. Various Internet searches I’ve done about this odd and violent event come up with nothing.

What was really going on with Edward Curry?

Missoula, Montana had a downtown bar called the Top Hat, which was one of the few venues that featured live music on a regular basis. I say “had”, because I believe the bar went out of business some time ago, though I understand it has now reopened. I left Missoula in 1987, when it was still in operation.

The Top Hat was renowned as a hippie hangout, where patrons wearing Birkenstock sandals danced to endless reworkings of “Mustang Sally” and other R&B standards. Just outside the door to the alley there was a covered overhang, where customers would congregate to smoke pot. Back in the 1980’s the cover charge was usually just a dollar, and behind the bar was the obligatory sign that read “Tipping is not a city in China”.

On May 2, 1985, a Wednesday afternoon, a very strange event occurred that involved the Top Hat, a violently schizophrenic man, a fellow pharmacy student scheduled to take a polygraph test, and possibly Jeff Ament.

At present, this essay is partly drawn from memory, and partly drawn from the Missoulian newspaper archives. If anyone reading this has any facts, leads, or especially photographs regarding this story, please feel free to contact me.

The story starts out in late spring of 1985. A classmate of mine in pharmacy school was applying for a job at a major pharmacy chain. Part of the application process was taking a polygraph test. Although this guy was an excellent student, he had a major history of illicit drug use. I was shocked to learn that he was something of a fan of PCP! The polygraph exam was preceded by a written questionnaire, in which he admitted to having smoked pot, but nothing more. He was terrified that he would fail his polygraph test, and was madly searching for a way to beat it. This was all occurring in the Stone Age before the World Wide Web, so naturally information on the subject was hard to get, and beset with bullshit. Being a pharmacy student, he naturally gravitated toward a pharmacological solution to his dilemma. He found an associate of his who had access to muscle relaxants, probably carisoprodol, the generic name for Soma. Evidently he was able to get just one dose from his “connection”, just enough to attempt to beat the polygraph.

The polygraph exam was to be administered downtown by a sheriff’s deputy or police officer. My friend screwed up his courage, took his drugs, and proceeded to walk downtown. He never made it to his destination.

Unknown to my friend, a strange psychodrama had been taking place in the Top Hat bar that afternoon. A man came into the bar, sat down on a bar stool and ordered a beer. A prosaic act, except that he also set down on the bar four unfired 12 gauge shotgun shells and a bottle of Stelazine, a powerful anti-psychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia. The man was living in an apartment in the same block as the Top Hat. In fact he lived on the top floor, with a view from his window of the brick wall that extended from the back door of the bar to the alley. The roofed overhand beloved by the potheads didn’t extend all the way to the alley.

Preceding the man’s visit to the Top Hat, someone had painted a rather large side-view image of a mohawked punk flipping “The Bird”.

Photo courtesy Kathleen Taubner and Kevin Hefty.

The image was well proportioned, and suggested the creator had legitimate artistic skill. After the ensuing events, rumors circulated that the artist was none other than Jeff Ament, whose motto at the time was “No Art, No Cowboys, No Rules.” I knew Jeff only peripherally, but I do know he considered himself very much a punk. As I assume most of you know, Jeff went on to become the bassist for Pearl Jam.

At some point that afternoon the psychotic man returned to his apartment, loaded his 12 gauge shotgun, and discharged it out his window down the alley, in the general direction of the Top Hat. Later, a motorcycle officer arrived on the scene, and was “peppered” with gravel kicked up by another shotgun blast.

Understandably, the entire area was quickly cordoned off, and a long stand-off between the psychotic man with the shotgun and Missoula authorities took place.

The officer tasked with administering the polygraph test to my pharmacy school friend was understandably re-assigned to the stand-off.

After several hours, the psychotic man gave up, and surrendered peacefully.

Being a “Family” type newspaper, the Missoulian didn’t print a photo of the punk flipping off the hippies. It wasn’t until the public was allowed back into the area a day or two later that one could piece together what might have really happened.

Some of the shotgun pellets hit the brick wall where the graffiti was. As part of the investigation, the cops had highlighted each little divot in the wall with a red marker. As seen from a distance, the punk now looked like he was sneezing blood!

From that fact alone, one could infer that the shooter must have had a clear line of sight from his window to the punk graffiti. It’s my belief that the shooter may have believed that the graffiti was intended for him, and not the Top Hat patrons. This possibility was of course never mentioned in the Missoulian…

Understandably, the mohawked punk sneezing blood, flipping off the hippies, was quickly painted over.

I visited Missoula in September, 2008, and carefully inspected the wall where the shotgun pellets had made their little divots, but the wall was coarse to begin with, and it looked like multiple coats of paint had since been applied. I couldn’t find any little divots.

As for my pharmacy friend, he had to re-schedule his polygraph exam. He couldn’t get any more drugs from his connection, yet he still beat it! I was amazed that he was able to do this, and asked him about it. He claimed he purchased a copy of Oui magazine shortly before his exam, and studied the photos of naked women intently. When questions about former drug use came up, he claimed he would simply distract himself with mental images of sexual fantasies.

As far as I know, he later got the job with the major pharmacy chain!

Part of the “official” newspaper account is found here.