Sterling Hall: Three Forty-Two in the Morning
Near Madison, Wisconsin
At three forty-two in the morning on August twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy, a bomb went off inside Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus.
The van was loaded with close to two thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, a mixture called ANFO. The four men who built and placed it were Karleton Armstrong, his younger brother Dwight, David Fine, and a fourth man named Leo Burt. Their target was the Army Mathematics Research Center, a Defense Department-funded unit housed on the upper floors of Sterling Hall. The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper, had published investigative articles arguing that the Research Center was performing work directly relevant to counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.
The blast destroyed the physics department's equipment and gutted the building. Three other people were injured. One person was killed.
Robert Fassnacht was thirty-three years old, a postdoctoral researcher in superconductivity. He was not affiliated with the Army Mathematics Research Center. He was in his basement laboratory in the early-morning hours monitoring an experiment. The physics department had no connection to the Defense Department work in the building above. Fassnacht was a father of three.
Karleton and Dwight Armstrong and David Fine were eventually captured and served prison sentences. Leo Burt vanished the morning of the bombing and has never been found. The FBI has kept his case open for more than fifty years, periodically releasing age-progressed photographs. He remains one of the longest-standing fugitives in American law enforcement history.
The Sterling Hall bombing was, at the time it occurred, the largest act of domestic terrorism in the United States. It did not stop the Army Mathematics Research Center. It killed a man who had nothing to do with the war, who was watching his experiment in the basement at a quarter to four in the morning.
Sterling Hall was rebuilt. The physics department still occupies it. A memorial to Robert Fassnacht stands inside.
