Omaha's Forgotten Panthers Part II: "Who made the bomb?"
by Kietryn Zychal
Ed Poindexter asked in a letter to supporters in late September 2020,
“Who made the bomb?”
“Who made the bomb?” asked Ed Poindexter in a letter to supporters in late September 2020. “The man who made the 911 call,” he answered. His shaky handwriting betrayed the fact that at 75 years old, he can no longer hold a pen firmly in his hand. “He did the perfect murder.” Perfect, because the voice on the 911 call has never been identified, and because the state’s main witness, Duane Peak, confessed that it was his voice despite evidence to the contrary.
AUGUST 17, 1970
In the hours after the explosion, police and prosecutors listened to a copy of the tape at the police station. In a 1995 book, "Very Special Agents", retired ATF agent James Moore wrote that members of Domino— a state and federal law enforcement task force in Omaha— concluded, "The Negro voice on the dispatcher's tape suggested Panthers." Sergeant Jack Swanson typed up a list of suspected NCCF members the day after the bombing.
Former Assistant County Attorney Sam Cooper testified during a 2005 deposition, “We felt that that [...] organization, as small as it was, was the one that was responsible for the death of Minard and the injury of the other individuals, so that’s what we focused on...We never had any reason to assume that anybody else was involved.”
Lt. James Perry expressed similar assumptions in a 1991 British documentary. “There wasn’t a policeman on the job that didn’t know who done that,” he told the filmmakers. “It was just a matter of being able to prove it. And that’s what we done.”
Sergeant Jack Swanson (pictured) rationaized targeting the Black Panther Party in the British documentary.
“I think we did the right thing at the time because the Black Panther Party— or whatever name it was going by at the time of the bombing— completely disappeared from the City of Omaha. [...] And that’s 21 years.”
Sgt. Jack Swanson
There were other leads, but none were investigated after police homed in on local suspects. One hour after the Omaha bombing, at three in the morning, a massive dynamite explosion rocked a federal courthouse in Minneapolis. Were the two bombings connected? Throughout the summer, dynamite explosions damaged police and civilian targets in both Iowa and Nebraska.
Several boxes of dynamite were seized in Omaha a few weeks before the bombing. According to a 1993 editorial by defense attorney David Herzog, “Police knew before the explosion where the dynamite came from and how it got to Omaha.” Herzog divulged during a 1998 radio interview on KPFK in Los Angeles, “It was brought to Omaha by members of a motorcycle gang.” He was told by police the gang wanted to disseminate the dynamite in the Black community so residents would kill themselves with it.
There is no indication the motorcycle gang was investigated for building a bomb with the dynamite they allegedly brought to Omaha. In the aftermath of the bombing, police received hundreds of tips from citizens, most of them rumor or speculation. Some were more substantial. A neighbor near 2867 Ohio Street saw two white men in suits entering the vacant house carrying a briefcase the day before the bombing. She assumed at the time they were insurance men.
AUGUST 22, 1970
• Peak family questioned and charged
• NCCF headquarters searched; two members arrested
• The illegal search of David Rice's house
Five days after the explosion, an unnamed informant reported that the Norris family might have explosives stored at their house and knew something about the bombing. Annie Lee Norris, 18, recounted in a deposition that six white police officers came to her mother’s home in the Spencer Street housing project late at night. They searched the entire house, took her to the police station and kept her until well after midnight. Her constitutional rights were read to her, and she was fingerprinted and bonded.
On the arrest record, she was charged as a “state’s witness.” Annie Lee told police she saw Duane Peak with a suitcase on Sunday, August 16th. Duane had cousins, Frank and Will Peak, who were officers of the NCCF, and Duane had sold Black Panther newspapers. Very quickly, investigators had a suspect who validated their initial suspicion.
On August 22nd, police questioned Duane’s family. His sisters Delia and Theresa told them they gave Duane car rides that Sunday when he had the suitcase. Several members of his family and some friends who rode in Delia’s car were charged as accessories after the fact in the first-degree murder of a police officer. Delia’s car was impounded and the dirt in her trunk was collected for chemical analysis.
the nccf flag
A digital recreation of the NCCF flag flown at the Omaha headquarters at 3508 N. 24th St. in the Kountze Place neighborhood.
Around five o’clock that day, police raided the NCCF headquarters looking for Duane Peak, though he did not live there. Edward Poindexter and Robert Cecil were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder. Some guns, ammunition and a calendar with the date August 10 circled were seized from the headquarters. Police then proceeded to Mondo’s house at 2816 Parker Street with the arrest warrant for Duane Peak, though he did not live there either.
They claimed to find a box of dynamite and blasting caps in the house. This search is described in detail in a companion article in this series, “Why the Illegal Search of Mondo’s Home Did Not Lead to a New Trial.”
At the police station, Duane’s brother Donald told Detective Pitmon Foxall he saw Duane take clothes out of the suitcase. He explained that Duane had been collecting his belongings from different places because he was leaving Nebraska to join the Job Corps in Utah. Page nine of a 12-page single-spaced typed report, states that the 911 call was played for Donald.
He did not identify the voice as his brother. At this point, Foxall may have explained to him what it meant to be charged with accessory after the fact. Donald asked, “What could happen to a person who knew about this stuff and didn’t have nothing to do with it?” Foxall assured him that nothing would happen to him if he told what he knew.
Donald began to repeat over and over that Duane told him he was transporting the suitcase “for the Party” but he did not mention the names “Edward Poindexter” or “David Rice.”
Donald admitted he was drunk on alcohol, marijuana and cough syrup during the afternoon before the bombing, so he passed out and woke up at 4 a.m. and went back to sleep. The morning after the bombing, Duane told him the suitcase contained dynamite. Donald told Foxall, “I think the only person who knew how to make it was Edward Poindexter.” He saw papers at NCCF headquarters on how to make a bomb. Poindexter was the head of the organization.
That evening, Foxall played the 911 call for Donald again. After spending eight hours in police custody, Donald agreed the voice was his brother’s.
AUGUST 28, 1970
•Sergeants Foxall and Coleman obtain a confession from Duane Peak (pictured)
Duane hid from police for six days until 3 a.m. on August 28. During this time, his grandfather, Reverend Foster Goodlett, made appeals on television for Duane to turn himself in. Goodlett had decades-long relationships with policemen, including Black detectives Pitmon Foxall and William Coleman and officer Aaron Dailey.
An FBI agent visited Goodlett and told him it would be in Duane’s best interest to surrender to the Bureau. Donald told his grandfather where Duane was hiding, and FBI agents accompanied by Omaha Police arrested him on the back porch of a house where he was sleeping. Duane said later that FBI agents drove him to the police station.
There, Lt. James Perry booked Duane for first-degree murder and read him his rights. He did not make a statement. The next day in custody, he met with his grandfather who reported in a deposition that Duane told him he “delivered the suitcase, and this was it, and not knowing just what had been set up.”
They were joined by defense attorney Tom Carey whom Goodlett had hired. Carey asked to speak to Duane alone. Goodlett reported that the attorney said afterward, “Well, there isn’t any need for us to talk longer, because I have told Duane it would be in his best interests to just tell what he knew about it.” Though it seems as though the district attorney made a deal in exchange for Duane’s testimony, neither the prosecution, Carey, nor any member of the Peak family would ever admit as much.
In Duane’s first statement to Pitmon Foxall and William Coleman— without his attorney present — he said his cousin Leslie Michael told him a woman was looking for him on Saturday. On Sunday, he found a note at NCCF headquarters on the desk with his name on it in green ink. The instructions inside said it was top secret. He was to go to the Lothrop drug store and pick up a suitcase in the alley. He should take it to an empty lot at 28th and Ohio between 10 and 11 o’clock that night.
He was told to be at a phone booth at 2 a.m. to receive instructions and a phone number to call. Duane said he thought the suitcase contained highly classified confidential papers. After placing the suitcase, he walked to the Spencer Street housing project and got a ride to his sister Delia’s house. He asked her for a dime to make the call which she did not have. He walked to 24th Street where someone gave him a dime and then he walked to the phone booth at 2 a.m. When it rang, a woman’s voice he did not recognize told him to call the police and report that a woman was dragged screaming into a vacant house at 2867-2866 Ohio Street. The report claims Duane dialed 911.
At the end of the second page of this statement, Duane (pictured) had incriminated only himself in the bombing.
He was facing charges of first-degree murder. Members of his family had already been charged with accessory after the fact. At this point, it looked like the Peak family would be put on trial for the murder of Larry Minard.
On the third page, the police report shifts in tone. Now, Duane reported twice that the suitcase had a hole the size of a nickel in it with six inches of insulated wire sticking out of it. This contradicted the first two pages where he said he thought the suitcase contained confidential papers. He confirmed that he got car rides from his sisters that day. Nowhere in this statement does Duane claim he got a car ride with the suitcase from a white woman named Norma Aufrecht.
This is the last police report Pitmon Foxall wrote about Duane’s involvement in the bombing. In fact, no police reports were written by anyone for the rest of the weekend.
A February1971 deposition by defense attorneys gives clues about those three days of questioning from August 28 - August 31, 1970.
Q: How many times were you questioned that Friday, Duane?
A: I am not sure about that, no, about when it was, whether that was Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they’re all mixed up.
Q: You couldn’t tell if it was daylight or dark out?
A: No.
Duane also divulged that he couldn’t tell what time it was in his cell. “..these days that I was in the City Jail, I just couldn’t tell about time.”
Asked about a third interrogation, he responded, “It was the same two officers that questioned me on one occasion, I think it was Monday or Sunday that two different officers talked to me, Captain Perry, I think.”
Lt. James Perry, who worked with the Intelligence Unit that was surveilling the NCCF, never filled out any police reports detailing his interrogations of Duane Peak that weekend. However, he told a federal judge in 1974 that he was present when Coleman and Foxall questioned him, though he made no record of anything that weekend.
Duane testified that Sergeants Coleman and Foxall told him “...they knew, you know, that I wasn’t the only one involved and they didn’t want me going up by myself.” He said they told him he could die in the electric chair. “They kept telling me the way things were going, I didn’t have a chance. They kept telling me they knew I wasn’t the only one involved.” Earlier, he admitted that Foxall or Perry “said they had an idea of who it was and said somebody’s name.” Duane refused to identify the individuals police officers suspected.
However, when asked who the police disliked most in the NCCF, Duane said, “...they definitely didn’t like Frank Peak and William Peak,” adding that they knew them more than anyone else in the Party. He claimed that police would stop Frank Peak in his car just to intimidate him, “trying to provoke him into attacking [them].” Though the interrogators tried to convince Duane to implicate other parties so he would not be put on trial by himself, he did not falsely accuse his cousins. Perry told Duane that the Panthers were after him, but Duane said he didn’t believe him.
AUGUST 31, 1970
•The first time Duane (pictured) implicates Poindexter and Mondo.
On Monday, August 31, after three days of undocumented interrogations, when Duane did not know the time or whether it was day or night, he gave a statement to the county attorney, Art O’Leary.
Present were Foxall and Coleman, ATF agent Tom Sledge and defense attorney Tom Carey. Duane asked, “Who is Mr. Carey?” when O’Leary mentioned his attorney’s name as he had only met him once.
Duane told the county attorney that the bomb was built on August 10— the day circled on the calendar confiscated during the raid of NCCF headquarters.
Poindexter allegedly told Duane to meet him at his cousin Frank Peak’s house that night. From there, they went to Mondo’s house at 2816 Parker Street. Duane said Poindexter went into the basement and brought up a case of dynamite. He got a suitcase from the bedroom and put three sticks of dynamite in it. He poked a hole in the bottom of the suitcase with a screwdriver.
About three inches of blue wire stuck out of the hole. He used a battery that came from a flashing street barricade. Duane said he did not watch how it was put together, but Poindexter balled up paper around the dynamite. Duane said Mondo was in the living room with him while Poindexter built the bomb in the kitchen, but Mondo left to go to a party before it was finished.
Three times in this statement, Duane said Poindexter got the dynamite out of the basement.
He put the suitcase bomb in the bedroom and put the dynamite back down in the basement.
Duane said the next night he and Poindexter walked all over the neighborhood together looking for a good house to bomb. Poindexter picked 2867 Ohio, half a mile away from Mondo’s house. They returned to get the bomb. Peak stayed in the house while Mondo and Ed left to observe a police cruiser that pulled over a motorist. (This incident did occur and was documented by the intelligence unit.) Poindexter decided not to do it that night because he had been seen by police.
Duane claimed he was supposed to meet Poindexter at his cousin Frank’s house again but he didn’t go there. On Friday, Duane was singing with a group of teenage friends at the American Legion and ran into Poindexter. He told Duane to plant the bomb by Sunday.
Duane said he went to NCCF headquarters on Sunday, and met a white girl called Sunny whose name is “Lamar”. Duane is actually saying “Amara,” but the court reporter mishears him. This is Norma Aufrecht— Amara was a name she adopted— but Duane cannot remember her real name, so the county attorney feeds it to him later. He claimed Lamar/Sunny/Aufrecht drove him to Mondo’s house to pick up the suitcase bomb and then drove him to Olivia Norris’s house. (Aufrecht will be charged with conspiracy to commit murder and accessory after the fact for these alleged car rides.)
His sister Theresa then drove him and his brother Donald from the Norris house to their sister Delia's house. At 10:30 p.m., Delia and her boyfriend gave Duane a ride to 28th and Ohio. He claimed he placed the suitcase, standing straight up, in the middle of the living room in the vacant house. The county attorney told Duane to tell him the entire truth and Duane responded, “I am because I want to hurry up and get out of this.” The county attorney later told him, “As a practical matter it doesn’t make any difference what the truth is concerning you at all,” but Duane refused to say that he armed the bomb to explode.
The county attorney guided Duane through the construction of the bomb, feeding him details he had left out, such as asking if a metal clothespin was squeezed open and held apart by a wedge of wood. Duane responded, "Yes." In truth, the bomb would have exploded if the clothespin was metal and wires were connected to the battery and the blasting cap. The wooden wedge would not have stopped completion of the circuit if the clothespin was metal. (Note: there is no mention of thumbtacks being inserted into the clothespin in this statement.)
When the deposition was over, Duane was taken to a county jail in Fremont, 25 miles away from Omaha. Arrest warrants for first-degree murder were issued for Edward Poindexter and David Rice.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1970
• Duane adds incriminating details to his August 31 deposition
Five days later, Lt. Perry sent three police officers, Burchard, Pfeffer and Dailey, to take an enhanced statement from Duane implicating another member of the NCCF in the bomb plot. Duane had requested that Foxall and Coleman come to Fremont but they did not take this assignment. Duane embellished his statement to add that Ed Poindexter told him he had a “beautiful plan to blow up a pig."
He claimed that NCCF member Raleigh House supplied a suitcase full of dynamite to build the bomb. In his August 31 deposition, he said the suitcase was in Mondo’s bedroom. Three times he said Poindexter got the dynamite out of Mondo’s basement. Now, inexplicably and illogically, Duane said an empty dynamite box was located in the basement. After Poindexter built the bomb out of three sticks of House's dynamite, he put the rest of it in the box in the basement. No explanation was ever given for why the dynamite was removed from the box and put in House’s suitcase in the first place.
SEPTEMBER 28, 1970
• Preliminary hearing: Duane recants.
At the preliminary hearing on September 28, Duane refused to tell the story the prosecution was expecting. When asked if he met Poindexter on August 10, he said no. When asked if he saw Poindexter pertaining to the Minard homicide, he said he didn’t remember seeing him. Duane said he was not at Mondo’s house on August 10. He said he did not see Poindexter at the American Legion. He said he didn’t remember giving any previous statements to the police or county attorney. The prosecution noted that Duane’s attorney was not present and called for a recess, over objections by the defense.
Six uniformed officers took Duane back to the police station. There, he met with his brother, his grandfather and his attorney. He was brought back to court in the afternoon. When the defense objected, Judge Simon A. Simon said “... he has been represented and he has also conferred with his grandfather, who is a minister and whom I have known for a long time...” It is undeniable that Rev. Goodlett’s stature in the community affected the way his grandson was treated by the Douglas County criminal justice system.
In the afternoon, wearing sunglasses, visibly shaken, Duane incriminated Ed and Mondo as the masterminds behind the bombing. Herzog asked him what happened on the break.
Q: Weren’t you reminded of a few things that would happen to you if you didn’t testify?
A: Yes.
Q: And those were the same things that the police officers told you about that would happen to you, like sitting in the electric chair, isn’t that correct?”
A: I didn’t have a chance.”
Q: You are doing what they want you to do, aren’t you?
A: Yes.
With that, Mondo and Ed were bound over for trial.
APRIL 1, 1971
• The flawed trial of Mondo and Ed Poindexter.
Sam Cooper told the British documentary makers in 1991, “Absent the testimony of Duane Peak, it was a weak case of circumstantial evidence.” The defense strategy was to highlight the inconsistencies of Duane’s eight different statements and to suggest that his testimony was fabricated and that he was saving his own life by incriminating Mondo and Ed.
The prosecution did not play the 911 call which lured Minard to his death for the jury. In the nine months between the bombing and the trial, there is no indication that any of the three defense attorneys listened to a tape recording of the call. Duane Peak admitted he made the 911 call and no one questioned his confession.
The defense attorneys presented alibi witnesses for Mondo and Ed for August 16th, the night of the bombing, but they did not develop their alibis for August 10th, the night the bomb was built which was a full week prior. They did not offer an alternate explanation for why August 10th was circled on the calendar seized from NCCF headquarters.
Norma Aufrecht (pictured), who was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and accessory after the fact for driving Duane with the suitcase that Sunday, was not called to testify by the prosecution. The defense never even interviewed her. She was arrested on August 26— five days before Duane gave a statement implicating her.
The search warrant for her house states that she was a known associate of “David Rice” and that a black Ford driven by her was parked in front of the NCCF on two occasions. It is questionable whether this was adequate probable cause to search her house or arrest her.
Rae Ann Schmitz, Mondo’s alibi witness, was never interviewed by his attorney. She spoke to him for a few minutes in the hallway outside the courtroom before she was called to testify. She was not allowed to be a character witness. She was only asked about the party at her house where Mondo slept the night of the bombing.
Mondo’s attorney did not accuse police of planting dynamite and blasting caps in his house, although it appeared to have been broken into immediately prior to the search. There is no photograph of dynamite in Mondo’s basement. Police took a photograph of the box (pictured) in the trunk of a car when they arrived at the police station.
An ATF chemist from the lab in Washington, D.C. claimed that lumps of dynamite visible to the naked eye were found in a pocket of Poindexter’s camouflage jacket and Mondo’s pants. No dynamite traces were found on the exterior of their clothing or their hand swabs. According to FBI lab whistleblower Fred Whitehurst, it is not possible for lumps to jump out of a stick of dynamite into someone’s pockets.
None of the defense attorneys accused the ATF or others of planting dynamite in their pockets. Instead, they attacked the chemical tests and claimed that laundry detergent or matches could have generated a positive result. Poindexter’s attorney claimed that Robert Cecil, whose hand swabs allegedly tested positive for dynamite, could have handed his client a pack of cigarettes and transferred particles to his pocket.
ATF agent Tom Sledge transported dynamite samples, Cecil’s clothing and hand swabs, and Poindexter’s clothing and hand swabs to the ATF lab on the same trip. Every sample he transported, including the dust from Delia Peak’s car trunk, showed lumps of dynamite particles. Yet, no defense attorney asked Sledge if he planted dynamite in those samples.
Police found a piece of wire on the floor of a workshop in the basement of the house next door to 2867 Ohio. The ground-level windows had been broken by the blast. As part of the investigation, an ATF tool expert cut a piece of sheet lead with Mondo’s pliers. He compared that inch of metal to the wire under a microscope. He found 15 points of similarity and 25 points of dissimilarity spread out along the sheet lead, not clustered together.
He claimed Mondo’s cheap, mass- produced Japanese pliers were the ones that had cut the wire. He did not test any other pliers to see if they made similar markings. The only wire used in the demonstration bomb came from the blasting caps. It was thinner than the piece of wire analyzed by the ATF.
The blasting cap wires (pictured) were covered with blue and yellow insulation.
The ATF technician did not explain what function the tiny piece of wire found in the house next door would have served in the bomb.
The defense did not have money to hire experts to challenge any of the forensic tests, nor could they find any to duplicate them. However, Tom Kenney, counsel for Poindexter, testified in a 2004 deposition that he went to the ATF lab in Washington, D.C. to look through their microscope to view a comparison between the piece of wire and the sheet metal. He said they showed him one comparison that looked identical. However, they did not show him the entire length of the sheet metal so he could see how many points were not identical. (Forty years later, reports from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) criticized pattern-matching analysis for its subjectivity, calling into question whether it could be called science at all.)
The prosecution presented a replica of the bomb in court. For the first time— at the trial— Duane said there were two thumbtacks on each side of the clothespin, which infers that it was a wooden clothespin. He explained that a wire went from the clothespin to the battery. A wedge of wood held the prongs of the clothespin apart: it was the only thing preventing the bomb from exploding. If the wedge came out from between the clothespin, it would snap together, the thumbtacks would complete the circuit between the battery and the blasting cap, and the bomb would explode.
The defense did not question whether Duane could carry this clothespin-triggered bomb all over North Omaha for six hours without causing an explosion. He testified that he took the bomb into three different vehicles and went for rides, opened the suitcase and took the blasting cap out of the dynamite, opened it again and put it back. Also, no witness who testified noticed the hole with the wire sticking out of it. At the trial, only Donald Peak said he saw the hole and the wire in Duane’s suitcase, but the defense pointed out that he had never before said that in any of his statements.
No one on the defense challenged the very fulcrum of the state’s case: could Duane have carried the bomb he admitted planting without causing an explosion?
There is another reason to doubt that the suitcase bomb was detonated with a clothespin triggering device. The first report by the ATF lab in Washington, D.C. revealed results from analysis on debris from the blast. The report said the suitcase particles had so much mercury on them, the chemist concluded that the bomb was detonated by a mercury switch.
A mercury switch is also called a tilt switch, because tilting it causes the explosion. The old- fashioned round wall-thermostats for furnaces have mercury switches. When you move the dial, mercury inside runs down a tube and when it contacts a switch, the furnace turns on. A mercury switch in a bomb operates on the same principle: if it is tilted, a connection is made and it explodes.
Duane could not have carried a bomb with a mercury switch. That type of bomb would have to have been built or triggered inside the vacant house. A neighbor reported that she saw two men in suits with a briefcase enter the house that Sunday. She assumed they were insurance men working on acquiring houses for the soon-to-be constructed North Freeway.
Deputy Chief of Police Glenn Gates wrote to the ATF and told them that he did some research and discovered mercury was a naturally occurring component of a suitcase. He claimed that Omaha had developed a theory that precluded the use of a mercury switch.
APRIL 17, 1971
• A jury of 11 Whites and one Black man makes a life or death decision.
The jury deliberated for four days before finding Mondo and Ed guilty. The Omaha World Herald reported they made a pact never to discuss what happened in those four days. In 1995, two female jurors were contacted. Lorraine Bartlett said that the Black juror, Dan Ware, believed they were innocent and he held up deliberations for days. Another juror, Charlotte Krin, said she did not believe Duane Peak’s testimony and thought they were innocent, too. Some jurors who believed they were guilty wanted to impose the death penalty. Ultimately, the jury delivered a compromised verdict: guilty with a life sentence.
Virginia Rivers, Ed Poindexter’s mother, recounted in 1995 that she was in a car with friends when they heard the verdict on the radio on April 17, 1971. She said the driver pulled the car over to the curb and she sat there and wept. Ed always told his mother, “Truth abandoned in the wilderness will eventually find its way back home.” Mrs. Rivers died in 2011 without seeing her son come home from prison. The truth is still in the wilderness.