Excerpt from the introduction of The Dynamite Fiend :

 

Tens of thousands of travelers crossed the ocean on the great transatlantic steamships in 1875, looking for love, for adventure, for profit, for new lives in new worlds. None yet suspected that on some of these voyages, amidst the hustle and bustle of ship life, an evil genius was in a first class cabin plotting to blow all his innocent fellow passengers to atoms. It was still an age of innocence that could not yet conceive of malevolent designs to destroy thousands of unwitting human beings in a single horrific stroke. But that innocence was about to come to an abrupt end.

The train from Bremen, Germany, was packed with travelers, making the forty-five minute journey out to the docks where they would board the Mosel, one of the nineteenth century’s elegant transatlantic steamships. Mostly emigrants to the New World, they were full of high emotion as they sat close to their loved ones, murmuring their sad farewells or chatting excitedly about their destinations in America. Many dreaded the ocean crossing, as they fearfully imagined seasickness, gales, icebergs, exploding steam boilers, and the occasional vessel that simply disappeared without a trace. Just a few days before, the steamer Deutschland had run aground on a shoal, and forty people had died in the rough waves and freezing winds before a rescue ship could arrive. Seated next to a group of nervous, inexperienced travelers was a bespectacled, portly man radiating expansive friendliness and calm. He called himself William King Thomas. From his neatly trimmed reddish-brown whiskers to the showy gold watch fob lying on his great belly, he appeared the respectable Victorian businessman. With a soothing, confident tone, he spoke expertly of his forty transatlantic crossings. It was all perfectly safe, he said.

When the train reached the dock in Bremerhaven, an eager young passenger, Fritz Zumann, detrained and made his way to the Mosel, accompanied by his aunt, his uncle, and his brother. It was a cold, sunny morning in December of 1875, and passengers shivered as they waited to embark, standing on the snow-covered dock, tearfully hugging and kissing their friends and loved ones. In his exuberance for his ocean adventure, undeterred by tales of shipwreck and the misery of passage, Fritz forged ahead of his family and boarded the massive ship. Behind him, a few workers stood near a baggage cart, drawn by a horse and holding a very heavy wooden barrel. They were attaching it to a winch when it slipped and hit the dock.

At that moment, as Fritz stood on the gangway next to the ship’s kitchen, the ordinary world suddenly exploded and surrounded him with flying wooden splinters and shards of glass and pottery. Shocked and deafened by the noise, which was like a bullet boring through his ears, he found that he had miraculously survived the furious blast, but was now trapped beneath the debris. Terrified that the ship would sink at any minute, he desperately clawed a hole and crawled for safety through a slick of blood and over remains of the unlucky ones. Outside, he found his aunt and uncle, lying in an embrace, stripped naked by the force of the explosion but still alive. And with joy he saw his brother, safe and unharmed, and they fell into each other’s arms.

Producing a great shockwave, the explosion had caved the bow of the Mosel and buckled the deck of its tug, the Simson. Cabins and decks were covered with sand, broken glass, and pieces of wood and twisted iron. On the cobbled loading area of the dock, the explosion had produced a black, smoking hole six feet deep and seven feet wide. The sound of the blast reached even to Hamburg, where it was perceived as a low rumble. In retrospect, the citizens of that city imagined that they had heard the moans of the dying. Traumatized witnesses would forever remember the scene as indescribable carnage, an apocalyptic battlefield, everything besmirched with blood and human flesh. The injured lay vulnerably naked and terribly maimed; whole families had been lost or severely injured. Soldiers were called in from a nearby drill ground to aid the Bremen police; four men were assigned to collect body parts from the dock, place them in a basket, and take them to the lighthouse. Others carried the wounded to the baggage hall, where they awaited medical personnel who had been rushed in by train.

In the midst of the chaos, the man called William King Thomas, who had already settled into his first class cabin, rushed onto the promenade deck and stared down at the scene. Others who stood witnessing the horror noticed him pull out a schnapps flask and take several deep swigs. With other dazed survivors, he moved about the wreckage, and engaged the Mosel’s captain in a brief conversation. Then he disappeared back into his cabin.

Baffled police officials, ship personnel, and witnesses struggled to make sense of the catastrophe. They immediately guessed it to be an accident. Zumann and many other survivors first thought that a ship’s boiler had exploded, an understandable conclusion given the still precarious nature of steam engines. Dozens of ships and thousands of lives were lost on rivers and oceans because of faulty boilers. But it was soon realized that only dynamite could have created such an explosion, dynamite packed in the luggage of a passenger. Over the next few days, a horrific scenario unfolded, an insurance swindle so innovative and cold-blooded that it could hardly be believed. Eighty-one people had died and some fifty were injured in a plan gone awry. And if the plan had been carried out as intended, several hundred more would have perished on the sea, the Mosel disappearing without a trace.

The perpetrator of this awful crime was the friendly, affable William King Thomas, much to the shock of his friends, who remembered him as an upstanding, prosperous burgher, a kind and loving father to his four small children. A big, friendly bear of a man, Thomas had always inspired the greatest confidence. Everywhere he went on his international travels he was admired for his gregariousness and his generosity toward everyone, including ordinary working people and the poor. He moved in the beau monde, among Saxon generals and American socialites, lavishly entertaining them and impressing them with his wealth, Victorian manliness, good humor, and charismatic charm. But William King Thomas was not what he seemed. Behind this respectable Dr. Jekyll hid a vicious Mr. Hyde who had spent many months perfecting an elaborate time bomb for the deed that the London Times called the “most diabolical that human wickedness could ever devise.” Newspaper editors across the Western world proclaimed Thomas the “Dynamite Fiend," a man who thought nothing of destroying entire passenger ships and all onboard for personal gain. He seemed to distill the worst of the new Gilded Age with its exuberant capitalism and unmitigated greed. Travelers feared that they, too, could be taken in by a pleasant, cosmopolitan stranger who, undetected, was planting bombs in the holds of ships.

The Mr. Hyde that the amiable Thomas so carefully disguised was his real identity, Alexander Keith, Jr., whose violence lay deep in a hidden past. Keith had once served as a Confederate secret service agent during the Civil War, and from his base in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had helped organized some of the most infamous terrorist plots of that war. He was part of a little known underworld, a web of Confederate covert operatives and terrorists, mostly social malcontents and misfits, who often confused their political cause with lust for profit. In their greed, rage, and desperation, they had no compunction about targeting innocent civilians if they thought they could gain wealth and glory by making a satisfactory psychological blow against the North. Toward the end of the war, betraying the trust of his nefarious colleagues, Keith had gone on the run, attempting to distance himself from his crimes, finally landing in Germany, where he lived a thoroughly respectable life. But Keith himself was a ticking time bomb that would eventually go off, to the grief of a nation and the stunned horror of the Western world.