CHILLING TALE OF THE FIRST 9/11
Wife of NY cop blown up by ’76 terrorists relives ordeal
AFTER the 9/11 terror attacks, a Suffolk Community College teacher had a special assignment for her students: Write about where they were and what they were doing that day.
She penned her own Sept. 11 experience. But it wasn’t what her class was expecting.
Kathleen Murray Moran’s husband had been killed by plane-hijacking terrorists in the city on Sept. 11 — but in 1976, exactly 25 years before the Twin Towers attacks.
“At the end of the class, I had the class read their stories, and then I read mine,’’ Murray Moran said. “The room was silent. They were amazed. That’s when I realized I had a very unusual, interesting story,’’ said Murray Moran, author of a soon-to-be-released memoir “Life Detonated.’’
Murray Moran’s husband, Brian Murray, was killed defusing a bomb that had been planted at Grand Central Terminal by a group of Croatian nationalists before they hijacked a TWA jet.
She would go on to lobby the city on behalf of all widows and children of fallen police officers, helping to create the now wellknown Survivors of the Shield organization.
She also would strike up an unexpected friendship with one of the hijackers — a woman whose husband had built and planted the bomb responsible for her spouse’s death.
FOR Murray Moran, life began when she met her future husband in the winter of 1968. The tall, red-headed, 21-year-old beauty recalled sitting with friends at a crowded bar in Flatbush, Brooklyn, thinking about the troubles back in her basement apartment on Faile Street in The Bronx.
She lived with an older sister addicted to drugs and an emotionally abusive mother in the family’s dank apartment. She wanted out, but had no clue how she could escape.
Then Murray, in a heavy navy peacoat, walked in.
He told her he was an airman who had just returned home after a tour in Vietnam, where he specialized in defusing bombs. After a few minutes, he assured her, “Someday I’m going to marry you.” Murray Moran was all in.
The two married, and Murray was hired by the NYPD and later placed in its elite Bomb Squad Unit. The couple moved to Rockville Centre, LI, and had two sons.
On Sept. 10, 1976, the cop kissed his wife and sons goodbye before leaving for his afternoon shift.
That evening, Murray Moran recalled, she put their boys, ages 2 and 4, to bed and lay in a lavender-scented bath, thinking about how, in another hour, her husband would be returning home.
Then she heard a frantic announcement coming from the television set in the bedroom.
“This is a special report from CBS News. TWA Flight 355 to Chicago carrying 86 passengers and seven crew members has been hijacked,” the broadcaster said. “Shortly after takeoff from New York La Guardia Airport at 8 p.m., the aircraft was commandeered by Zvonko and Julie Busic, a Croatian and his American wife. They claim to have a bomb on board the plane and a second device located in New York City.”
Murray Moran’s heart sank when the camera began panning Grand Central Terminal and she saw her husband in his NYPD vest, removing what appeared to be a harmless shopping bag from one of the lockers.
The cameras didn’t show Murray and his unit bringing the bomb back to the department range at Rodman’s Neck in The Bronx, where three officers — including her husband — began defusing it. It exploded shortly before 1 a.m. on Sept. 11.
Meanwhile, Murray Moran was at home, praying that her husband would return soon.
Then two officers from the NYPD appeared at her door.
“We lost him,” one of the officers said, shaking.
Two officers were injured in the blast. Murray was killed.
AFTER Murray’s death, his widow recalled thinking she couldn’t live anymore, either. “Brian delivered me from the purgatory that was Faile Street, but his death sent me to a level of hell from which there was no exile,” she writes.
“I worried I would fall back into that poverty and somehow my boys would slide into the hardship I’d experienced as a child.”
The financial stress began to pile on. The NYPD told her that she would receive only half of her husband’s pension, $879.77 a month, and if she ever remarried, she wouldn’t get a penny.
Murray Moran became morbidly obsessed with wanting to know exactly how her husband died. “Brian removed the bomb from a locker and brought it to the range. Then what?” she recalled thinking. “The implica-
tions of his next steps settled in my stomach like acid. Did he cross wires? Was it his fault?”
At his funeral, his body was kept in a closed casket, at the urging of those around her.
“‘Not suitable for viewing. Not suitable for viewing.’ The words echoed dully in my head as I stood staring at the coffin,” she writes.
She said that as she stood alongside her husband’s comrades, “We were all thinking the same thing: Why did this happen?”
The NYPD refused to answer some of her persistent questions — and then stopped taking her calls, she said.
“It was a different time. They hid their problems, and they didn’t want me to know the ugly truth. I was a victim of that time where they hid their dirty little secrets,” she said.
She decided to sue the city for answers.
At a wrongful-death trial, Murray Moran learned her husband had been killed by a piece of the bomb that sliced his neck. But she lost her lawsuit to learn why the bomb had detonated.
As she raised her children and struggled to earn an education, Murray Moran began lobbying the city on behalf of all widows and children of fallen police officers.
She eventually became cofounder of Survivors of the Shield, a group that advocates for and provides assistance to the families of cops killed in the line of duty.
REVEALING gritty and highly personal details in her book caused a lot of anxiety for her, Murray Moran says.
But she notes that remaining honest was how she managed to tackle the part of the memoir that dealt with her controversial friendship with the woman whose husband was the mastermind of the hijacking.
Julie and Zvonko Busic were among the group of five terrorists fighting for the independence for Croatia, a republic of what was then Yugoslavia.
After Zvonko planted the bomb at Grand Central, he, his wife and the three others hijacked the New York-to-Chicago flight. They were caught after landing in Paris.
Murray Moran ended up corresponding with Julie Busic for three years, writing to the convict both before and after she was paroled from prison in 1989. The two women shared 50 letters between them, Murray Moran said.
Murray Moran admitted being attracted not only by the Oregonborn Busic’s blond looks but also by her strange story.
“I knew it made no sense, but my appetite for Julie’s letters and their intensity felt almost sexual in nature,” Murray Moran revealed in her memoir.
“She wrote like a lover, crawling back to me, and sometimes I found I had memorized lines of her letters without meaning to.”
Against her better judgment, Murray Moran said, she wrote a letter to the parole board to help get Julie released. Julie Busic had told her she was divorcing Zvonko and wanted to start a fresh life.
But when the two women finally came face-to-face at a lunch at O’Neal’s near Central Park, Murray Moran said, she discovered she had been played.
Busic told her that she had remarried Zvonko in prison and was lobbying for his parole.
“She sat across from me in her new outfit, telling me she was still fighting her ex-husband’s cause. She had lied,” Moran wrote.
“I set my napkin on the table. ‘I’m not going to help him get out of jail,’ I told her. ‘ As a matter of fact, I’m going to do everything in my power to keep him locked up for the rest of his life.’ ”
Zvonko was, in fact, granted parole in July 2008 on the condition that he leave the United States.
He and Julie moved back to his homeland. But on Sept. 1, 2013, Zvonko committed suicide at the age of 67 by shooting himself at his home.
His body was discovered by Julie. “I wrote a sympathy note to Julie and said I know how she felt,’’ Murray Moran said.
“Forgiveness allowed me to grow, forgiving my sister, my mother and Julie, among others. It allowed me to move forward.”
TODAY, Murray Moran is remarried with another child, a daughter. On the corner of Bleecker and Charles streets in the West Village — right outside the NYPD’s Bomb Squad headquarters — there is a street named Brian Murray Way.
It was dedicated to the heroic officer in 2014 after Murray Moran’s lobbying efforts.
“I saw all these streets were getting named after politicians and comedians. So I asked for Brian,’’ she said.
Murray Moran says she wonders if the thousands of people who walk along and by the street daily ever think about him, as she does.