Instead, she was met with an explosion. Bryce Werling, 72, looked up to see his wife with blood gushing down her face. “She was screaming that she couldn’t hear,” said the farmer in pin-striped coveralls. In the car rushing to the hospital, they asked each other, “Why us? We don’t have any enemies.”
It was a small-town boy from Minnesota, Lucas Helder, 21, who is believed to have planted 18 pipe bombs in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Colorado and Texas. In the horrifying anxiety before his capture last Tuesday night in Nevada, people wondered how an outsider could slip unnoticed down so many gravel roads without raising suspicions. But Helder hardly looked like an outsider. The fair-haired young man had grown up in a modest house in the cornfield’s embrace outside Pine Island, Minn., a town of about 2,000. His father, Cameron Helder, a construction worker, had tipped off the police, and delivered an emotional plea for his son to give up.
The anti-government notes he left had provoked fears that terrorists were storming the American countryside. But federal investigators now feel confident Helder was acting alone, driven more by pyschological demons than any political cause. When he was arrested, he wore a goofy grin. He told the police he had taken pictures of ghosts. He had planted the bombs in a rough geographical circle, he explained to authorities, because he hoped to create a pattern of a smiley face. It seemed he didn’t understand the fuss. His victims saw it differently.
In his hometown, Helder was known as an average kid. He played golf and the guitar, but never caused much of a ruckus. Something seems to have changed in the last year at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie, where he was an art student and played in a grunge band, Apathy. One of his classmates, Amanda Dolan, said he would give long-winded speeches about bizarre notions of “astral projection” and other offbeat spiritual beliefs. “He lost me quite often,” says Dolan.
In a typed six-page letter he sent to the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Helder rambled about his beliefs, writing that “death is not real.” Much of the letter was incoherent. “I remember these days of uncertainty,” he wrote. “I can’t tell you how great it is to know, to know eternally, and to be.”
Though Helder has been caught, people in the countryside confess they’re still a little rattled–a feeling only fueled by a spate of copycat incidents. It will be a long while, some said, before they open the mailbox without thinking twice. Delores Werling has regained most of her hearing, but her arm is still sore from the blast. She said Helder “needs help.” And she hopes he gets it.
