What happened to Leo Burt?
UW-Madison Sterling Hall blast was 50 years ago today
MADISON – It was 50 years ago, but Bob Shaffer hasn’t forgotten. It’s not something anyone who lived through could forget.
Shaffer was talking to his partner as their squad traveled down West Washington Avenue toward the Capitol Square midway through their 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift as Dane County Traffic Department officers.
It was 3:42 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1970. The night sky lit up and began glowing yellow. Then the kaboom — because sound travels a bit slower than light — as 1,700 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil packed into the back of a stolen white Ford Econoline van ignited in a fireball.
The van had been parked in a loading dock driveway next to Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Leo Burt and Karleton Armstrong, both 22, had pulled it into position, lit fuses leading to sticks of dynamite, and then sprinted toward a light yellow Corvair, where Armstrong’s 18year-old brother Dwight waited.
They picked up David Fine, 18, at a pay phone at the corner of University Avenue and Park Street. He had just phoned Madison police, telling them a bomb was set to go off in five minutes at the Army Math Research Center, located inside Sterling Hall.
Until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which used the same template of a vehicle packed with fertilizer and fuel oil, the bombing was the worst domestic terrorism incident in U.S. history. It killed a physics researcher, injured three other people, damaged numerous buildings and destroyed the life’s work of many scientists.
Shaffer and his partner turned their squad car around and sped toward the brightened sky, not knowing what had happened or exactly where.
Thirty years old that morning, Shaffer had served as a military police officer in the U.S. Army in Germany. A former officer had given him a piece of good advice: When heading toward a crime or a police call, pay attention to vehicles heading away from the scene.
As Shaffer’s partner drove north on Park Street, Shaffer saw a light-colored Corvair — he thought it was white in the darkness — speeding in the opposite direction underneath the train trestle. As if on cue, the Corvair driver abruptly turned right — away from the oncoming squad car — and headed west on Spring Street.
Shaffer couldn’t see the license plate or how many people were inside the car. But he was suspicious enough to radio a dispatcher what he’d seen.
“We got one block from where we had seen the car when the dispatcher made a flippant remark that there was a bomb threat at Sterling Hall. I said ‘Bingo, we got our people,’” said Shaffer, now 80 and still living in Madison.
In one sense, authorities did get their people. The bombers were quickly identified, thanks in part to Shaffer’s alert description. But in another sense, they didn’t get them. Karleton Armstrong was on the run for a year and a half, Fine was not arrested until 1976 and Dwight Armstrong the following year.
Burt has never been found.
Of more than 500 fugitives in the long history of the most wanted list, only a handful have not been caught. Burt is among the longest, if not the longest, still out there. He remains on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists. His photo, the same one issued back in 1970 of a smiling, curly-haired young man with wire-rimmed glasses, is on the FBI’s online page between an al-Qai
Authorities rope off Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus hours after a truck bomb exploded on Aug. 24, 1970. MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL FILES
da terrorist and a hijacker.
“I have to think it’s extremely stressful to be looking over your shoulder for 50 years,” said FBI Special Agent Doug Raubal, who is stationed in Madison and as part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force spent the last three years on Burt’s case until earlier this year.
Shortly after the Sterling Hall bombing half a century ago, there were several chances to catch Burt and the other bombers.
A couple of hours after Shaffer’s radio transmission, acting on an all-points bulletin of a white Corvair possibly involved in the Sterling Hall bombing, two Sauk County sheriff ’s deputies stopped a light-colored Corvair heading into Devil’s Lake State Park.
Inside were the four bombers. They claimed they were camping, but when the deputies asked why they didn’t have any gear, the quartet said they wanted to lock in a campsite and then retrieve their camping gear — even though it was two hours before the park opened.
They gave the deputies their real names. The deputies kept an eye on the four as they waited for the park office to open, but around 7 a.m. a Sauk County sheriff ’s dispatcher radioed that three of them had clean records and Fine only had a shoplifting charge. With no warrant for their arrest and the deputies’ work shifts ending, the officers left the park.
Soon after, so did the bombers.
Leo Frederick Burt wanted poster taken from the FBI website. Photos show how he may have aged over the years.
‘Maybe he never would have turned’
Leading up to the Sterling Hall bombing, UW had been a hotbed of Vietnam War protests for several years. The Army Math Research Center, the only Army-funded think tank in the U.S., was one of the focal points of protest.
Acquaintances of Burt later told officials that he was affected by the shooting deaths of four students by Army National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970.
Burt grew up in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he attended Catholic schools, serving as an altar boy. He took up rowing in high school and chose UW in 1966 because of its strong crew program. He also enrolled in Naval ROTC and attended a summer camp at the Marine base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
He rowed three years as a Badger but because, at 6 feet tall, he was shorter than most of his teammates — who were 6-5 and 6-6 — he failed to advance to the lead boat and grew frustrated.
His coach, Randy Jablonic, recalled Burt as an excellent athlete, the hardest-working rower on his squad. Burt was so bright, Jablonic said, he probably could have attended Harvard. When Jablonic, who coached from 1960 to 1997 and was called “Jabo,” told his rowers they needed to cut their hair to attend an alumni banquet or quit the team, Burt wrote an eloquent two-page letter explaining why he shouldn’t have to trim his locks.
“He said ‘Jabo, things aren’t going to change unless we get dynamic. However, I don’t want to sabotage the rowing program to be adverse so I will cut my hair and come to the banquet,’” recalled Jablonic, now 85.
The coach still regrets Burt quitting after his junior year because he couldn’t make the traveling squad.
“I always felt if I could have somehow fit Leo into the team, found him a seat — he wanted to row so bad — maybe he never would have turned to something else,” said Jablonic.
Burt began writing for the campus newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, covering protests, riots and rallies. In 1970, he wrote about getting injured while trying to cover a protest at the Memorial Union, writing “Cardinal reporter Leo Burt was beaten and had his gas mask confiscated by Dane County police who were not deterred by his press card,” according to “Rads,” a 1992 book about the Sterling Hall bombing.
Burt met Karleton Armstrong on campus and later introduced him to Fine, who also wrote for the Daily Cardinal. Some time that summer, Armstrong and Burt hatched the plan to bomb Sterling Hall, where the Army Math Research Center was located on the second, third and fourth floors. Armstrong recruited his brother to join the group.
After they were caught, the Armstrongs and Fine said they picked the late hour to explode their bomb figuring no one was in Sterling Hall. But Robert Fassnacht, who was conducting post-doctoral research on superconductivity, was pulling an all-nighter because he was due to take his wife and their children, a 3-yearold son and twin 1-year-old daughters, on a vacation to San Diego later that day.
Inside Shaffer’s squad car was a stretcher, and he and his partner, who were the first officers on the scene, transported Fassnacht’s body to the morgue.
“Certainly I believe (Burt) has a debt to pay to society here in Madison. They took a brilliant young man’s life, a husband and father with an incredible future who probably could have been a great asset to our society,” said Shaffer.
Sterling Hall also housed UW’s physics department in the basement and first floor and the astronomy department on the fifth and sixth floors with an observatory on the roof.
Shaffer remembers seeing distraught researchers standing outside Sterling Hall who told him their doctoral theses and research, which were not backed up on computers in those days, had been lost in the explosion.
On the run, and then nothing
It didn’t take long for authorities to find evidence linked to the bombing — Karleton Armstrong renting a trailer, Burt and the Armstrongs buying 1,700 pounds of fertilizer and massive quantities of fuel oil, notebooks found in Burt’s belongings with a diagram of Sterling Hall and an “X” at the site of the truck bomb, Burt checking out from a campus library a how-to pamphlet on making a bomb from fuel oil and ammonium nitrate called “Pothole Blasting for Wildlife.”
Within a day of the bombing, the four borrowed a car to drive out East, eventually splitting up. Fine and Burt ended up in New York and Boston where they procured fake IDs with the names Matthew Robert James and Eugene Ronald Fieldstone. They crossed into Canada and checked into a youth hostel in the central Ontario community of Peterborough on Aug. 30, one week after the bombing.
The Armstrong brothers also spent time in New York and eventually stole a car to drive to Canada. They were stopped because of a loud muffler, but police incorrectly entered the stolen car’s registration number and they were released. Before the Armstrongs left the upstate New York police station, they asked if they could take the newspaper lying on a desk. The newspaper’s front page featured a story about the bombers, including their photos. No one at the police station noticed or made the connection.
After Burt phoned a high school rowing buddy to ask him to wire $25 under his assumed name while he was staying at the hostel in Ontario, the Canadian Mounted Police began watching the place. But without warrants, the Canadians couldn’t arrest them. By the time immigration warrants were issued on Sept. 3, 1970, Fine and Burt had fled out the back window of the hostel, leaving behind their fake IDs.
Fine and Burt parted company. And that’s where the trail for Burt grew cold.
Fine was apprehended in California in 1976. He has maintained that he doesn’t know what happened to Burt after they fled the Ontario youth hostel.
Because the FBI did not have the authority to charge the bombers with terrorism in 1970 — those laws didn’t exist at the time — the four were charged in Dane County and later indicted in federal court in Madison for murder, sabotage, destruction of government property and conspiracy. Those counts remain intact for Burt.
Burt picked an opportune time to disappear. In 1970, driver’s licenses were pieces of paper without photos, there were no cameras on street corners, no internet, no social media, no computer networks linking law enforcement departments. If it was easy for him to get a fake ID with the name Eugene Fieldstone, it was probably just as simple to take on another new name and persona.
A guy who pursued the challenging sport of rowing, who trained with the Marines, who studied journalism and philosophy at UW, who was intense, thoughtful and bright, Burt is the type of person who “has the absolute discipline to stay apart from anybody,” said his crew coach.
Even if Burt turns himself in or is found, what’s the likelihood he would serve a long prison term?
Karleton Armstrong, who was caught in Toronto in 1972, served nearly eight years. He ran a juice cart for many years on the library mall on campus. Fine served around three years and went on to earn his college degree and law degree but was denied admission to the Oregon Bar and went on to work as a law clerk. Dwight Armstrong, who was arrested in Toronto in 1977, served around three years. He later drove a cab in Madison and died in 2010.
Fassnacht’s wife stayed in Madison and raised her children there.
“If (Burt) were alive I’m sure he was totally aware of what was happening back here. The sentences Fine and Dwight got were short,” said Mike Zaleski, 79, a former Dane County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Karleton Armstrong. “So much time has passed.”
The FBI is still offering a $150,000 reward for Burt’s capture. His coach hopes Burt will someday give himself up and let someone get the reward to do something good with the money.
Said Zaleski: “Wouldn’t it be funny if he walked in and gave himself up on the 50th anniversary?”
Anyone with a tip about the whereabouts of Sterling Hall bomber Leo Burt should contact the FBI, 800CALL-FBI (225-5324) or online at fbi.gov.