The tidy white package, about the size of two videocassettes stacked together, looked innocuous enough -- no different, in fact, from millions of other packages landing in homes and mailboxes across the country this holiday season -- and it sat on the kitchen table for about a day before Thomas Mosser got around to opening it. When he did, however, on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 10, it proved deadly: the blast nearly decapitated Mosser as he stood there in his bathrobe, and it carved a crater about two feet wide in the kitchen counter. It was only the most chilling sort of luck that no one else was injured -- Mosser's wife Susan and daughters Kim, 13, and Kelly, 15 months, as well as a neighborhood child, were in other parts of the big North Caldwell, New Jersey, house.
But what people who knew the 50-year-old advertising executive still cannot fathom is why -- why Tom Mosser? Recently promoted to one of the top jobs at Young & Rubicam and described by friends and colleagues as quiet and reliable, he was a family man who on the day of his death had planned to go Christmas- tree shopping with his wife and children. "I haven't gotten used to talking about him in the past tense," says his old friend James Dowling, an executive at Burson-Marsteller, a public-relations firm where Mosser worked for 25 years. "If you were a friend of Tom's, you were a friend for life." Dowling and Mosser often played golf together and took their eldest daughters for an annual holiday dinner in New York City. "With deaths by natural causes, it's easier, because you think there is a reason for it," Dowling notes. "Here there is no reason."
The question of motive is precisely the matter troubling investigators for the FBI, who believe the mail bomb that killed Mosser was the work of a devious serial bomber who has eluded them for 16 years. Their ongoing investigation -- dubbed Unabom because the criminal's early targets were people at universities and airlines -- has drawn together a string of 15 incidents since 1978 that have killed one other person and injured 23. But while authorities can say with certainty that this latest blast bears some of the Unabomber's trademarks -- the return address on the package named a fictitious sender in Northern California, where the bomber is thought to reside, and the device, like earlier ones, was an intricately built pipe bomb inside a handmade wooden box -- they have not as yet determined what links his various targets. And although a task force of 25 agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Postal Service is working around the clock on the case in San Francisco, investigators seem to have made little progress in catching their methodical madman. Says James Fox, a former chief of the New York FBI office who worked on a Unabom case in 1993: "I don't think we're much closer than we were 16 years ago."