The Arrival of a Prime Suspect

TWA Flight 355 was bound for Chicago when it took off from LaGuardia on Sept. 10, 1976. The plane, with 86 passengers and a full crew aboard, was taken over by five hijackers a short time later.

They claimed to have bombs.

The leader of the group, Zvonko Busic, was fighting for independence for Croatia from then-Yugoslavia. With him were his American wife, Julienne Busic, and three sympathizers.

Their plane "bombs" were determined later to be fakes. But Busic had a plan to convince authorities in New York that he meant what he said. He planted a bomb in a coin-operated locker at Grand Central Station in New York and told police where to find it.

The hijacking was already being taken seriously. But the bomb in the locker caught the attention of Dreher and others still investigating the nine-month-old LaGuardia bombing.

Inside the damaged terminal.

"We found the bomb sometime about 5:30 p.m. We took the bomb up to Rodman's Neck [a police firing range] in the Bronx," Dreher said. "They were working on it at about 9 or 10 p.m. when it went off."

One cop was killed and another was seriously injured. Although the timing mechanism and battery Busic's group used were different than the ones used by the LaGuardia bombers, investigators had strong suspicions the two incidents were somehow related because they had both been placed in lockers.

"Naturally, we got excited," Dreher said.

The hijackers finally surrendered in Paris, after French police shot out the tires of the plane and talked them into giving up. The hijackers were taken back to New York on another flight.

Dreher sent a couple of his best interrogators, detectives Joe Coffey and Frank McDarby, to meet the flight. He wanted confessions before any lawyers showed up. But the FBI thwarted their efforts. Federal agents interrupted the interrogation to take Busic to court for an arraignment on the hijacking charge.

"We thought we would get some form of admission. We were terribly disappointed," said Dreher.

McDarby, who is retired, told the television program "America's Most Wanted" in 1993 that Busic gave conflicting accounts of how he had learned of the LaGuardia bombing. At one point, Busic said he had heard the news on a radio in a taxicab. Another time, he said he heard of the bombing on the news at home.

Busic told the show, as well as McMurray, the writer, that he had nothing to do with the LaGuardia bombing. Busic also claimed that he been awake for more than 100 hours when he was interrogated.

Busic was sentenced to life for the death of the police officer and for the hijacking and is being held in a Leavenworth, Kan., federal prison. According to a transcript of a 1997 interview with McMurray, Busic said the death of the police officer could have been avoided and that he regretted it immediately.

He also insisted that after police knew he planted the Grand Central Station bomb and engineered the hijacking, there would have been no reason not to admit his involvement in La Guardia bombing.

"My offer still stands ... I am volunteering to be hypnotized, to take sodium pentothal [a so-called "truth serum"], to take [a] polygraph test, and also [a] DNA test, or any combination of the above, and then submit to questioning about [the] LaGuardia bombing," Busic wrote in a July 1997 letter to McMurray. "... If you know some people who are seriously interested in knowing the truth about me, I am at their disposal."

Busic is regarded as a national hero in Croatia, which finally won its independence after he had spent 21 years in prison. The Republic of Croatia has been lobbying Washington to transfer Busic to his homeland to serve out of his sentence. So far, there has been no public response.

McMurray and Dreher both wondered aloud whether Busic, who has been denied parole several times, is still being held because of lingering suspicions about the LaGuardia bombing. In the meantime, his co-conspirators remain free.

Dreher said that after 27 years, he would not jump up and down in protest if Busic were sent to Croatia, provided he tells what he knows, if anything.

"There are 11 graves out there crying for an explanation," Dreher said. "I regret it like mad, but I am satisfied that everything that could have been done was done at the time. It's just a [shame] that we didn't break the case."