Lone Wolf Terrorism (34 page)

Illustration of Charles Guiteau shooting President James A. Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, DC, on July 2, 1881. Garfield survived for more than two and a half months before succumbing to his wound. Guiteau, who was mentally ill, was found guilty and hanged on June 30, 1882. (Library of Congress)

Illustration of the assassination of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901. Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot the president at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, with a concealed revolver in his right hand, which was wrapped in a handkerchief. McKinley died eight days later. (Library of Congress)

Photographs of Czolgosz taken shortly after his arrest. He told police he thought it was his “duty” to shoot McKinley due to what he believed was the president's indifference and hostility toward the working people of the United States. (Library of Congress)

Czolgosz was tried and convicted in a two-day trial in September 1901 and executed one month later. The assassination of McKinley led the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, to declare the equivalent of a “war” on anarchism. (Library of Congress)

The Wall Street bombing on September 16, 1920, represented the first vehicle bombing in the United States. A horse-drawn wagon exploded in front of the J.P. Morgan and Company bank headquarters, killing thirty-eight people and injuring more than two hundred others. The bombing is believed to have been the work of a lone wolf terrorist, Mario Buda, who fled the country shortly after the attack. (Library of Congress)

A United Airlines executive points to the spot on the reconstructed plane where an explosion took place shortly after takeoff from Denver on November 1, 1955, killing all forty-four people onboard. The incident represented the first major midair plane bombing in US history. (AP Photo/Edward O. Eisenhand)

John Gilbert Graham sits with his wife, Gloria, outside a district courtroom in Denver. Graham had placed several sticks of dynamite in his mother's luggage on the United Airlines plane in order to collect a $37,500 insurance policy he had taken on her life. The bombing made the public and the government aware for the first time of the need for airline security measures. Graham was executed in 1957. (AP Photo)

Muharem Kurbegovic held Los Angeles in fear during the summer of 1974 with a bombing at Los Angeles International Airport and a series of subsequent terrorist threats. He became known as the “Alphabet Bomber” because his attacks were supposed to spell out the name of his fictitious group, “Aliens of America.” The first attack at the airport represented the letter “A.” (AP Photo/Wally Fong)

Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in a Tel Aviv court. Amir killed Rabin on November 4, 1995, because he felt Rabin was betraying Israel in peace negotiations with the Palestinians. (AP Photo/Motti Kimchi)

The Unabomber's mansion in Montana. Theodore Kaczynski lived in this shack, where he constructed package bombs that he either sent to his victims or left at the scene of the attack. Over the course of seventeen years, beginning in 1978, he was responsible for a total of sixteen bombings throughout the United States that killed three people and injured twenty-three others. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Kaczynski was arrested in April 1996 after his brother, David, informed the FBI that writings he discovered by Kaczynski resembled the Unabomber manifesto that had been published in the
Washington Post
. Kaczynski pled guilty and received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. (Federal Bureau of Investigation Photo)