Lucas John Helder, the 21-year-old college student who was arrested in connection with a rash of 18 pipe bombs planted in rural mailboxes in five states, told the Federal Bureau of Investigation Wednesday that he was responsible for making the explosives and placing them in the mailboxes.
Mr. Helder used a map to point out the towns in Illinois and Iowa where he planted the bombs, Mark Heavrin, an F.B.I. agent, said in an affidavit.
Mr. Helder also told authorities that he planted bombs in Nebraska, Colorado and Texas, and he admitted to making 16 more bombs in a hotel room near Omaha.
The authorities arrested Mr. Helder on Tuesday on a highway 40 miles east of Reno, Nev.
About eight hours after the F.B.I. issued an all-points bulletin with his description, the student, Lucas John Helder, pulled over on Interstate 80 near Fernley, Nev., and tossed a gun to the ground as he surrendered to state troopers who had been following him.
Trooper Alan Davidson of the Nevada Highway Patrol said Mr. Helder was talking to the F.B.I. on his cell phone before being taken into custody at about 4:30 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday.
Investigators said they believed that Mr. Helder, who grew up in Pine Island, Minn., and studied art at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie, was responsible for all the bombs, which injured six people on Friday and rattled nerves across the Midwest. Residents were asked to leave their mailboxes open and report any suspicious items to the police as Mr. Helder apparently drove his father's 1992 gray Honda Accord some 3,000 miles across the country since Friday.
Trooper Davidson said the police tracked Mr. Helder heading west from a cellphone call he made in Battle Mountain, a mining town of 4,066. Federal officials said someone at the 8,000-student Menomonie campus alerted them that Mr. Helder had recently disappeared. His parents met with the authorities Tuesday morning and were cooperating.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Helder's father, Cameron Helder, defended his son before reporters and urged the young man to turn himself in.
"I really want you to know that Luke is not a dangerous person," Cameron Helder said in a brief statement outside his home. "I think he's just trying to make a statement about the way our government is run. I think Luke wants people to listen to his ideas, and not enough people are hearing him and he thinks this may help."
"Please don't hurt anyone else," the elder Mr. Helder added in an appeal to his son. "It's time to talk. You have the attention you wanted. We want you home safe."
The United States attorney in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, charged Mr. Helder with using an explosive to maliciously destroy property affecting interstate commerce and using a destructive device to commit a crime of violence, charges that could send him to prison for life. Officials said he would also be charged in Illinois and Nebraska, but were unsure where he would be taken first.
The student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, The Badger-Herald, reported Tuesday night on its Web site that it had received a six-page letter from Mr. Helder, postmarked in Omaha on Friday, and had turned it over to the F.B.I. The first page was identical to the notes attached to the bombs, and the rest include further ramblings on the meaning of life and death and ruminations on the environment and technology.
"I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them, without knowing if they are consuming anything at all," the letter said. "All of my family and friends were raised to believe . . . to be gullible . . . to be materialistic . . . to fear authority . . . to blindly follow.
"Do you wonder why people blow themselves up to hurt others?" it continued. "Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there . . . way out there? I remember those days of uncertainty, and I can't tell you how great it is to know, to know eternally, and to be."
The suspect's identity, and a yearbook-style photograph showing him smiling between a crew cut and bright yellow and black tie, confounded terrorism experts who had thought the threatening anti-government notes that accompanied the bombs was written by an older man. Mr. Helder, who used to play in a grunge rock band in Minnesota, does not fit the profile of a bomber, and he has no criminal record.
University officials said he stopped attending classes three weeks ago, returned briefly and then left the campus a week ago.
"He is being described as an intelligent young man with strong family ties," Jim Bogner, the F.B.I.'s special agent in charge of Nebraska and Iowa, said Tuesday at a news conference in Omaha.
After Mr. Helder's arrest, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, issued a statement praising the cooperation of dozens of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
"Citizen vigilance coupled with effective law enforcement is a powerful combination in the fight against terrorism," Mr. Mueller said.
The F.B.I.'s all-points bulletin, issued Tuesday morning, came after the announcement of yet another bomb found in a mailbox, this time in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. The authorities said they were unsure whether that bomb was planted before or after one found about the same time in Salida, Colo. Like the ones found over the weekend in Nebraska, the bombs in Colorado and Texas were not set to go off, suggesting a de-escalation of violence after the injuries on Friday.
Mr. Helder was arrested some 1,717 miles from Davenport, Iowa, where the first bomb was discovered at 6:49 a.m. Friday when a man pulled a copy of the Quad-City Times from his mailbox outside of town. Davenport is 267 miles from Mr. Helder's parents' Pine Island home, and 302 miles from the 8,000-student university campus where he is a junior and a member of the paint-ball club.
On Friday, seven nearly identical bombs were found between 10:49 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. in small towns forming a rough circle 70 miles across. A letter carrier injured his arm and lost his hearing. Another had 14 stitches to his right hand. A 70-year-old farmer's wife had her faced bloodied by an explosion that her husband said sounded like a blown tire.
The next day, another crop of bombs appeared in a ring of Nebraska farm communities 400 miles away along Interstate 80. A man taking a break from planting corn near Davenport, Neb., thought the bomb in its plastic bag was an advertising gimmick. A letter carrier used to seeing strange items, from beer bottles to Avon cosmetics, in rural boxes, simply slipped the mail under the package in Ohiowa, Neb.
On Monday, as rural letter carriers used to more natural dangers like deer and tornadoes wore heavy gloves and goggles and dropped mail only in boxes with latches left open, bombs were found in Salida, 552 miles southwest of the last one discovered in Nebraska, and Amarillo, 416 miles southeast of Salida.
Built of six-inch lengths of three-quarter-inch steel pipe and nine-volt batteries, the bombs cost no more than a few dollars and would take just a couple of hours to make.
Moments after the F.B.I.'s all-points bulletin Tuesday morning, the Web site of Mr. Helder's band, Apathy, was filled with messages denouncing him as a "fascist pig," and saying, "only a coward puts bombs in places to hurt innocents." Later, someone posted a message supposedly from Mr. Helder, signed, like the letters accompanying the bombs, "Someone who cares."
"You all are just a bunch of conformists conforming to the will of the overlord media who rules over the land with an iron fist," it read.
Mr. Helder sang and played guitar for Apathy, a three-man derivative of Nirvana that lasted for about a year and made one album, "Sacks of People." Its signature single, according to the band's Web site, was called "Conformity." He was in the class of 1999 at Pine Island High School, in a town of about 2,000 15 miles from Rochester and 55 miles from the twin cities where a 19th century hand-wound clock tower presides over Main Street.
"I hate to use the word average to describe a student, but that's what he was, average," said Don McPhail, who taught him American history in 10th grade. "He said nothing out of the ordinary, but we change as we grow older."
In Menomonie, a rural farm town not unlike the ones where the bombs were planted, officials at the century-old liberal arts college sent a campuswide e-mail message offering counseling and saying Saturday's graduation would not be rescheduled. Students who live in Mr. Helder's building were barred from their apartments for hours.
Those who know him described Mr. Helder as a student who blended in and never revealed radical leanings in conversation or his artwork.
"He rarely missed class - if he did he would find out what he missed," said Nancy Blum, who taught Mr. Helder design theory last spring. "He was one of those students who got along well with adults."
Bill Sampson, who took a design class with Mr. Helder last fall, said he had ingenious projects: turning a pencil sharpener into a light and creating a waterfall from several oil funnels.
Students gathered around televisions as their classmate's face was flashed to the nation, and fielded telephone calls from their parents.
"We've had several bomb threats since 9/11," said Maggie Schmidt, 23, a sophomore business major. "It kind of scares me that they never caught the person making the bomb threats at my dorm. I don't know if this is the same person, but this news kind of freaked me out."
(China Daily May 9, 2002)
