September 1, 1978: Brett Kimberlin starts Speedway Bombing spree with 4 bombs

On the evening of Friday, 1st September 1978, Brett Kimberlin unleashed his first four bombs on Speedway, Indiana. The main Indianapolis area newspaper reported the first three of the bombings as front page news the next day. These first three exploded shortly before and after 10:00 pm.  Brett Kimberlin's authorized biographer Mark Singer noted that the lack of major injuries "seemed more a matter of luck than of design." Still, the bomb Kimberlin concealed in a trash can next to the Speedway Shopping Center knocked over two bystanders and some received cuts from flying glass as storefront windows were destroyed. This first bomb also destroyed the windshield of a car in the adjacent parking lot. One of Kimberlin's other bombs that night was in a hotel dumpster and no one was very near the blast. Another bomb was "in the 1600 block of Whitcomb Avenue," a residential area. Finally, after midnight, and apparently after the Indianapolis Star's press time, bomb #4 blew up some bushes on the grounds of Speedway High School. Singer notes that "As the crow flew, it went off less than a hundred yards from the Scyphers residence." If you're not already familiar, please read why Brett Kimberlin wanted Julia Scyphers killed and why he bombed Speedway.

On the strength of the bombs

Brett Kimberlin used tubes of Tovex gel explosive in all of his Speedway bombs. Tovex is a modern replacement for dynamite that's harder to accidentally trigger, but the explosive power is very similar. These Tovex tubes are not comparable to ordinary fireworks, cherry bombs, or a typical charge of gunpowder. They are serious, powerful explosives that can break through rock and soil, shred cars, shred people and throw them up into the air, and permanently destroy eardrums. Reports on the September 1 bombings note that they were heard from up to 5 miles away.

Based on my personal understanding of hand grenades, your typical anti-personnel hand grenade probably has lower explosive power than a single tube of Tovex, however there are other factors in the lethality of an explosive device besides blast strength. I would guess that the bombs that didn't use lead shot could actually have a quite lower kill radius than a hand grenade, whereas those that did use lead shot could have killed from a frightening distance, perhaps meeting or exceeding the hand grenade's kill radius.

Brett Kimberlin's first four bombs didn't use any of the copious amounts of .445-caliber lead balls he'd bought a couple weeks before. Those lead balls will be mentioned again in later posts.

On the placement of the bombs

Brett has never explained his rationale behind bomb placement. Some of them were put in places where they were less likely to hurt anyone. Some of them, owing to confluence of timing and placement, were overwhelmingly likely to hurt someone. Speaking only of September 1, 1978, the bomb placed near the Speedway Shopping Center was placed too late at night to hit most customers, but there were still people around (as later articles will explain, some helped ID Brett Kimberlin and his car) and a few got minor cuts from flying glass. One wonders if the one placed 100 yards from the Scyphers residence was meant to intimidate. A single Tovex package would have similar explosive power to a full stick of dynamite, and would have been extremely loud from 100 yards away.

I can't find any source that explains the exact location of the Whitcomb Avenue bomb, but it makes me curious if it was placed near a house for a particular reason.

On the design of the bombs

All of Brett's bombs included Tovex explosive inside an aluminum can. Blasting caps had to be used to trigger the Tovex. The blasting caps themselves were triggered by a charge from lantern batteries, and the contact was closed by an electronic timer. Every one of Brett's bombs seems to have included all these parts. Only some of them also included any of the huge amount of lead balls Brett bought. The four bombs from the night of September 1, 1978 did not yet include lead shot.

Reminder on the apparent motive of the bombings

Brett Kimberlin set off bombs to distract and confuse the local Speedway police, who were few in number and unaccustomed to deadly crime. Brett felt he needed to distract the police because their investigation of the Julia Scyphers murder had him and William Bowman as the only two suspects. And Brett hired William Bowman to murder Julia Scyphers because Scyphers was interfering with Brett's pedophilic relationship with Scyphers' granddaughter, who Brett pursued aggressively starting when she was 10. The relationship ended when the girl was 14, apparently because they started having arguments and Brett retaliated by taking away the girl's beloved family dog, and also slapping her on two occasions.