George Peter Metesky was born on November 2, 1903, in Waterbury, Connecticut, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. He was the youngest of three children — quiet, devout, and unremarkable. After enlisting in the U.S. Marines, he served two tours as a specialist electrician at the American consulate in Shanghai, where he also trained as an ordnance mechanic. When he came home, he got a job as a mechanic with the utility company that would eventually become Con Edison.
On September 5, 1931, everything changed. While working as a generator wiper at the Hell Gate generating plant in the Bronx, a boiler valve backfired. A blast of superheated gas hit Metesky full force, knocked him to the ground, and filled his lungs. He coughed up blood in front of two coworkers. His foreman told him to keep working. Twenty minutes later, he collapsed again.
After twenty-six weeks of sick pay, Con Edison let him go. He was twenty-eight years old. He would never work again.
The Grudge Takes Root
The tuberculosis that followed made sure of that. In the 1930s, TB wasn't something you treated with antibiotics and moved on from — it was a long, grinding illness that wrecked your lungs, and for a lot of people, a death sentence. Metesky said the accident caused it. Con Edison disputed the connection. That disagreement became the center of everything.
He filed a workers' compensation claim in 1934. The state denied it — not on the merits, but on a technicality. He'd waited too long. The deadline was two years. He appealed three times. Denied every time. During the hearings, Metesky became convinced that three former coworkers had lied under oath to protect the company. Whether they actually did or not, he believed it completely, and that belief became the core of his grudge.
He moved back to Waterbury, lived with his two unmarried sisters, went to Mass, and spent his days in his garage workshop. He wrote letters — by the end, upwards of 900 of them — to Con Edison, the mayor, the police commissioner, newspapers. He tried to buy ad space to tell his story. Nobody responded.
The Bombings Begin
On November 16, 1940, someone left a wooden toolbox on a windowsill at a Con Edison power plant on West 64th Street. Inside was a short brass pipe packed with gunpowder, wrapped in a note signed "F.P." The bomb never went off.
A second bomb turned up in September 1941, near Con Edison's headquarters. Same construction, carried in a wool sock — a detail that became Metesky's signature. It didn't detonate either.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Metesky sent the police a letter: "I will make no more bomb units for the duration of the war — my patriotic feelings have made me decide this." And he kept his word. For the entire length of World War II, George Metesky did not plant a single bomb.
He kept sending letters, though. Always in block capitals. Always signed F.P.
The City Under Siege
On March 29, 1951, a pipe bomb exploded inside a phone booth at Grand Central Terminal. It was the first of Metesky's devices to actually detonate. From that point on, he didn't stop.
Over the next five years, he planted close to thirty bombs across New York — in phone booths, restrooms, storage lockers, and movie theaters. Grand Central, Penn Station, the Port Authority, the New York Public Library, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center. His method at the theaters was the most unsettling: he'd buy a ticket, wait for the lights to go down, slice open the seat next to him with a penknife, push the bomb inside the cushion, and leave.
Between 1940 and 1956, he planted at least thirty-three bombs. Twenty-two detonated. Fifteen people were injured. Nobody died.
Then came December 2, 1956. About fifteen hundred people were inside the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, watching a screening of War and Peace. A bomb hidden inside a seat in row GG of the orchestra section went off. Metal fragments tore through the surrounding rows. Multiple people were seriously hurt. In a packed theater during the holidays, it could have been catastrophically worse.
The NYPD had been chasing this guy for sixteen years and had nothing. That's when they turned to a psychiatrist named James Brussel — and what happened next helped invent criminal profiling as we know it.