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A Cold Case Heats Up: The Townhouse Explosion 56 Years Later

FDNY responds to Weatherman townhouse explosion – Fair Use

Of all the events that unfolded in the first half of the 1970s, none has haunted me more than the blast in an apartment building in Manhattan that claimed the lives of three members of Weatherman and their fledgling underground organization. All that past came back to me the other day when a journalism student at Columbia reached out to interview me about the “townhouse explosion,” as it has come to be known. A very cold case has suddenly heated up, and not by any prosecutor or by Trump’s Justice Department. The case is so old that it’s now “academic.” But is it “safe” to talk about it?

I have been interviewed about it and have written about it for more than five decades. I keep trying to wrap my head around it and it doesn’t want to be wrapped. It’s too messy.

The BBC interviewed me before anyone else could get their hands on me. I had no problem talking about the explosion. I have never had a problem. I talk too easily and perhaps make up for people who say little or nothing, perhaps out of a sense of fear. The Columbia journalism student who reached out to me belonged to a team assigned by their professor the task of writing about the blast and its fallout. A tough assignment. Memories have faded. Secrets have burrowed even deeper down than ever before. Sixties self-proclaimed revolutionaries have become armchair lefties and wallow in nostalgia. I live on memories.

At this late date, we probably won’t ever know what actually took place in the townhouse on March 6, 1970, and in the days and weeks running up to that time. I did hear through the grapevine that one of the bomb makers accidentally connected two wires that ought not to have been connected. Kaboom! In the winter of 1971, about a year after the townhouse explosion, I watched a knowledgeable bomb maker assemble the bomb that went off in the US Capitol, that destroyed property and didn’t take anyone’s life.

Cathy Wilkerson is........

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