Victim: 'It Was Evil'

Queens Chief of Detectives Edwin T. Dreher was investigating a drug-related murder in the neighborhood of Astoria, less than two miles from LaGuardia, when his radio crackled with a report of the explosion.

Dreher, 48, immediately directed his driver to rush to the airport. On the way, the seasoned, 24-year department veteran launched what at the time was the largest NYPD investigation in history, using his radio to summon all available detectives from New York's five boroughs.

Ambulances were just arriving when Dreher's car screeched to a stop at the TWA terminal.

"There was the residue of the bomb. You could smell whatever it was in the air and see the huge explosive force that had blown the floor and ceiling out," Dreher, now 73, retired and living in South Florida, told Courttv.com. "All the windows were blown out."

View from outside the bomb site.

A police lieutenant had set up a makeshift morgue and triage center. Dreher ripped down some of TWA's drapes to shield the victims from the gathering horde of television cameras. Nowadays, the dead would have been left where they were until photographs were taken and measurements made to aid in reconstructing the scene. But forensic investigations were not as sophisticated in 1975.

Dreher and his senior commanders quickly settled on a plan of action. One group of detectives was sent out to write down the plate numbers of every vehicle parked at the airport. Another group was dispatched to area hospitals to interview survivors and gather information about the dead.

Eleven dead, 74 injured was the final toll.

But the number of dead and injured could have been much higher. The baggage claim area where the bomb went off was mostly cleared of passengers when it exploded. For the most part, the victims were airport employees, limo drivers, people waiting for rides, and passengers who had just picked up their luggage.

One of the survivors was H. Patrick Callahan, a 27-year-old lawyer from Indianapolis en route to see clients in Connecticut. Callahan and his law partner at the time, Stephen Cline, 41, were shielded from the blast by a concrete support.

"My law partner and I had gone outside to see where the limo was," Callahan said. "We had just gone back and we were leaning against one of those big columns. The people who died were standing next to us."

Callahan does not know if he was unconscious for five seconds or five minutes. When he got to his feet, all he could see was dust. He could not even see Cline, two feet away and slightly injured. Callahan, whose hearing did not return fully for a week, is grateful he could not see the bodies through the dust.

"People had left except those of us waiting for rides. A lot more people would have been dead. The bomb appeared to have been placed in the lockers directly adjacent to the carousel that the luggage was on," Callahan said. "It was evil."

Investigators quickly determined that an explosive device was, indeed placed in one of those coin-operated lockers that were once commonplace. The explosion ripped apart the lockers, propelling large and small pieces of sharp, jagged metal at great speeds.

"The people who died were hit by shrapnel," said nationally known forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who was then deputy New York medical examiner and who performed several of the autopsies.

Callahan still has two scars on his left arm, reminders of the deep gashes patched up by doctors at Jamaica General Hospital. He also has the leather belt that someone — he doesn't know who — strapped to his arm as a tourniquet.

At the hospital, Callahan said there was speculation that the Puerto Rican nationalist group, FALN, planted the bomb. "That's what we were led to believe," he said.