Art of Anarchy

Boston Bombing

During the annual Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, 2 bombs detonated 12 seconds and 210 yards (190 metres) apart at 2:49 P.M., near the finish line of the race, killing 3 people and injuring several hundred others, including 16 who lost limbs.

The 3 deaths involved Krystle Marie Campbell, a 29 year old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts, who was killed by the first bomb, Lü Lingzi, (Chinese 吕令子) a 23 year old Chinese national and Boston University graduate student from Shenyang, Liaoning, as well as 8 year old Martin William Richard from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, who were both killed by the second bomb.

On the morning of April 15, 2013, hours before the explosions, David Bloss told detectives, his son Daniel Morley was helping with yard work when he took a phone call, then left without a word. His behavior made Bloss uneasy, so much that when the news of the deadly explosions on Boylston Street surfaced, he asked his wife, Glenda Duckworth. "Where is Daniel?"

Morley did not come home for two days. When he returned, he merely told Glenda he had gone fishing in Maine with a friend.

"His mother was worried," Sergeant Detective Gary Hayward recalled during a recent interview with Newsweek, adding that she was also shocked by her son's callous reaction to the deadly bombings. According to court records, when Glenda told her son that some of their neighbors had been injured by the blasts and hospitalized, he stared coldly at her and said, "what's the big deal? People are dying all over the place."

Bloss told Hayward that Morley also called the two young women and the boy killed by the explosions "collateral damage."

Hayward took careful notes as the couple talked. Those notes, contained in court documents obtained by Newsweek, are now part of a large, complicated argument about suspicions that continue to haunt local law enforcement five years after the marathon bombings.

The authorities are certain they captured the two men who carried out that deadly attack, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother, Dzhokhar, but they don't know who created the bombs they used that day or the explosives they had with them a few days later, when they were cornered by various law enforcement officers and agents. They are certain the Tsarnaev brothers didn't make those bombs.

When Morley was coaxed out of his mother's home and hauled away in an ambulance that morning in Topsfield, Hayward and his men made an astonishing discovery. His room was a well stocked, bomb making facility, and it had several components identical to those in the explosive devices used at the Boston Marathon, down to a box top for a 6 quart Fagor pressure cooker.

The cooker was the exact size and brand the brothers left near the finish line, filled with BBs and shrapnel, powered by Christmas lights and detonated remotely with an initiator constructed from toy car parts.

As Topsfield cops and state police continued their search of Morley's bedroom and a shed in the backyard, the FBI suddenly arrived.

The FBI has said repeatedly that they don't know who armed the Tsarnaev brothers for their bloody attack, but cops in the Boston area think that there's a suspect in plain sight and that the bureau and the U.S. attorney are protecting him for some reason. "It is incredibly troubling to look at the facts surrounding this guy, Daniel Morley, and have no understanding whatsoever about why the FBI got involved in his case, why the charges were dismissed and how the circumstances about his connection to the marathon bombers were kept quiet," says Jerry Flynn, executive director of the New England Police Benevolent Association, one of Massachusetts's largest police unions.

"We are talking about bombs that killed a little boy, two women. We have a dead cop. This kind of secrecy shouldn't be tolerated."

The FBI maintains to this day that the bombers were not known to the bureau before the photos were made public, despite the fact that federal agents interviewed Tamerlan and his family multiple times in 2011 after Russian counterterrorism officials warned the FBI and the CIA that they had intercepted communications between Tamerlan and militants in Russia's Northern Caucasus, where the Tsarnaevs emigrated from.

FBI officials also have yet to explain why bureau agents were in the Tsarnaevs' neighborhood, which is roughly a mile from MIT, the night Dzhokhar killed Collier.

"The FBI clearly knew more about the Tsarnaevs than they were willing to share with local law enforcement," a statement from Former Somerville Police Chief, and longtime Drug Enforcement Administration official Tom Pasquarello. "There are a lot of unanswered questions about that night."

Sergeant Detective Gary Hayward began preparing a case against Morley in June, 2013, carefully cataloging Duckworth and Bloss's suspicions about him. "I asked them if Daniel had Muslim beliefs," he wrote in a search warrant affidavit, and was told that "he did read the Quran."

Morley was also studying Russian and Arabic on his computer and had a video that offered careful instructions on how to make a detonator similar to the ones used for the Boston Marathon bombs.

But Hayward's detailed case files would never make it into a courtroom, which law enforcement officials across the state find perplexing. On March 26, 2014, Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett filed a nolle prosequi, a legal term that means he had dropped all the charges against Morley and would not pursue others.

"What's the point of having laws written to deter exactly what this guy did?" A statement from a retired Boston Police bomb technician familiar with the Morley case, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Everything this guy had in his house was in violation of the state bomb bill."

Blodgett gave no explanation, other than the statement issued by his spokeswoman. "Mr. Morley must comply with Department of Mental Health, including medications, and not abuse his family."

The FBI declined to answer questions about Morley in 2013, and refused to answer questions about him during Dzhokhar's trial in 2015.

Morley's court appointed lawyer, Robert LeBlanc, has a simple explanation for the dropped charges and the FBI's reticence. "The FBI got it wrong. There was obviously a lot of pressure from law enforcement on this case. They followed a lead that led to a dead end with Dan." When asked why his client had stockpiled so many bomb making materials, Leblanc said Morley didn't remember doing that and "he had a breakdown."

That explanation doesn't satisfy Hayward, who remains befuddled by the FBI's handling of his case. Morley never appeared in any courtroom on the charges. His appearance was waived at his arraignment, where his father posted $20,000 bail, which was returned to him when the Essex County DA dropped all the charges in 2014, while Morley was still confined to one of three separate mental health facilities he resided in full time between June 9, 2013, and June, 2015.

He was released from Tewksbury State Hospital about a month after a federal jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Cops wonder if that is a coincidence. "That's a good way to keep someone out of sight until the trial is over," remarked an MIT police officer who knew Sean Collier, but isn't authorized to speak on the record. MIT police have also declined to answer questions about Morley, his time on campus or the contents of the locker he maintained on campus even after he quit.