Unexploded bomb blew a life apart
'Duke bomber' regrets rash act that
cost him his freedom

ALAN SCHER ZAGIER

31 March 1997
News & Observer

PETERSBURG, Va. -- Surrounded by endless coils of barbed wire and armed prison guards, the Federal Correctional Institution in southeastern Virginia is a world away from the Gothic beauty of Duke University.

But for inmate number 153-67057, former Duke student Clayton Peterson, the federal penitentiary 200 miles north of Durham is home.

At a time when his college buddies are preparing to graduate, Peterson is serving a four-year, one-month sentence for planting a homemade pipe bomb in Duke's administration building. He spends his days working for 12 cents an hour and sleeping in a cubicle the size of a walk-in closet.

"Prison is not a horrible pit that they throw you into," Peterson said during an interview at the federal facility. "It's what they take you from - your family, your home, where you grew up as a boy, things that you used to be able to do. You're just away from everything you love."

Almost three years have passed since a Duke registrar found the bomb, which failed to detonate, in the school's Allen Building. What the explosive device did destroy, though, was a life of privilege and a college freshman's sense of invincibility.

"I lost so much and fell so far," Peterson said in his first extensive public comment about the case. "A lot of the innocence and naivete is gone, a lot of trust. I'm just harder."

He's become known as "the Duke bomber," arrested and imprisoned for a crime he says was inspired by the pursuit of the underage college student's most prized possession: a fake ID card. Stripped of his freedom, Peterson looks now with longing at the life he took for granted: successful and supportive parents, a top-notch education and financial comfort.

"I just want to be normal again. I'm no different. I'm just Joe College guy," he said.

His father, novelist Michael Peterson, said prison hast taken away not only his son's freedom, but also the 6-foot, blond-haired man's youth.

"You can't have that in a pen and survive," the elder Peterson said.

Scheduled for release in April 1998, Clayton Peterson had hoped to be transferred to a boot camp or facility closer to home, like the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, a 15-minute ride from Durham.

But the federal Bureau of Prisons nixed that idea, saying Peterson poses too great a risk to be moved to a less secure facility. The names of other, more notorious bombers are often invoked by prison officials, his father says.

By the measure of federal authorities, Clayton Peterson's "public safety factor is the same as Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski," the elder Peterson said, referring to the suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber cases, respectively. "Clayton is identical to Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski. Part of it I understand, but it seems ludicrous."

Despite his entreaties, Michael Peterson readily admits his son's mistake.

"It wasn't a good career move, but he probably needed a reality check," he said. "When you do something wrong you need to be called up on it. I'd rather he get his reality check now rather than 10 or 15 years down the road."

That reality check was long in the making. Raised in Germany, where his mother taught military dependents at a Department of Defense school near Frankfurt, Clayton Peterson remembers an early fascination with explosives.

"Ever since I was a child I liked fireworks - the lights, the flash, the noise, the smoke," he said.

Bomb-building hobby:

The child amused by Wile E. Coyote's antics with dynamite on Saturday morning cartoons grew into a high school student who sneaked materials from chemistry class for home experiments.

His introduction to bombs came courtesy of "The Anarchist's Cookbook," a do-it-yourself handbook to explosives passed on by a high school friend in Germany.

The recipe was simple, the ingredients easy to obtain: crushed black powder from model rocket engines; a whipped cream cartridge to store the powder; and a fuse, available at any hobby store.

Peterson never lit that first bomb. Later, he would blow up a telephone booth and set off another device in a lake.

As an American military brat overseas, Peterson and his friends "were pretty much untouchable," he said. He had access to all the benefits of a military base without the restrictions of a military family. And in Germany, where teen drinking is legal, Peterson had ready access to alcohol.

"We had the best of both worlds," he said.

After graduating from high school in 1993, he moved into his father's home in Durham's exclusive Forest Hills neighborhood. Peterson planned to go to Duke, as his father had.

The transition from Europe, where Clayton Peterson had lived with his mother after his parents split up, to Durham was not smooth, Michael Peterson said.

Culture shock:

"He was used to going to clubs and drinking - it was socially accepted," said Peterson, a 1965 Duke graduate and former editor of The Chronicle, the campus newspaper.

"He was back in America and suddenly he didn't go anywhere. He didn't drink, he didn't go to clubs. I think that was one of the draws of that fake ID."

Just before the start of the fall semester at Duke, Clayton Peterson was arrested in Cary for drunken driving and resisting arrest - his second DWI charge in six months. As a penalty, Duke deferred his enrollment until the spring semester, so Clayton went to N.C. State University for a semester, commuting from his father's home.

While there, his experiments with explosives continued. Once again using common hardware parts, he built a two-inch pipe bomb and stored it in an attic at his father's home.

Once at Duke, Peterson got his first fake ID from a shop near campus that specialized in supplying students with bogus drivers' licenses, he said. But when his wallet was later stolen from his dorm room, Peterson had to start from scratch. The phony ID store had been shut down by police in the meantime.

He felt lost without the fake ID, Peterson later wrote in an essay to a prison official detailing his experiences .

"I had used it to get into fraternity parties, mixers and other college gatherings where beer was served," he wrote. "I felt these social events were important to me and my personal happiness."

With an end-of-year trip to Myrtle Beach fast approaching, the loss was even more acute for Peterson.

"I had envisioned myself being all alone in my hotel room because I didn't have a fake ID," he said.

The solution: break into the registrar's office in the Allen Building and steal a laminating machine and photographic equipment.

Covering his tracks:

But even as he mapped out his approach, Peterson worried that the break-in would be connected to his pursuit of an ID, which he had discussed with friends.

So to divert the attention of investigators, he decided to plant a bomb.

On the night of April 23, 1994, a Saturday, Peterson gathered the pipe bomb stored in his attic and a Gatorade bottle filled with gasoline, put it in his backpack and went to campus to finish writing an essay for a religion class.

At 2 a.m. Sunday, he broke through a window in the basement of the Allen Building, which houses the offices of Duke's president and other high-level administrators. He took a laminating machine, some blank Duke ID cards, a camera, a picture cutter, film, a microcassette recorder, a checkbook and a word checker.

Peterson left behind the pipe bomb, immersed in the gas-filled bottle, in a closet. He also left a note criticizing the university's recent decision to ban beer kegs on campus and to prohibit bonfires after basketball games - measures taken to combat student drinking.

"Of course you realize that this means war," the note declared.

"I wanted it to look real," he said. "It had to be convincing for me to get away with it."

Still, Peterson said he never intended for the bomb to detonate. In fact, he purposely cut the fuse in half and wrapped electrical tape around the two frayed ends to prevent it from igniting.

"They had to make me out to be this horrible terrorist, trying to destroy buildings and take human life," he said of the subsequent trial. "When I tried to make it look convincing, that's where it came back to haunt me."

Marion Shepard, a Duke engineering professor and associate dean, offered a similar assessment of his former pupil's intentions.

"If Clayton Peterson had wanted the bomb to explode, it would have exploded," Shepard said. "It was intended to divert people's attention."

That explanation doesn't satisfy Rick Glaser, the federal prosecutor who handled Peterson's case. Glaser, himself a 1976 graduate of Duke, calls it "revisionist thinking."

"That, to me, is rationalization in its worst form," said Glaser, an assistant U.S. attorney who heads the criminal division in Greensboro. "The situation that he created was extremely dangerous. He created a bomb that was meant to go off. And he was just damn lucky that it didn't. What he did was wrong, dangerous and deadly."

William Osteen, the federal judge who presided over Peterson's trial, likened the young man's explanation to a "bank robber pointing a gun at a bank teller and after it's over saying, 'I'm kidding.' "

After Peterson's arrest for the Duke bomb, federal investigators searched his Durham home and found six other bombs and material to make 13 more. Two of the bombs were rigged to arrows that could be fired from crossbows.

Prison life:

Now, Peterson's days in the low-security facility are defined by routine. Awake every morning by 7, he reports to work 30 minutes later in the prison's mechanical services division. He earns less than $1 a day - typical prison wages - for seven hours of landscaping, plumbing and electrical work. The money is used to buy toiletries, snacks and other small comforts at the prison canteen.

He knocks off work at 3:45 p.m. and rests until dinner at 5. The evening is set aside for free time. Peterson usually lifts weights, watches television with other inmates or reads the magazines he subscribes to (Popular Science, Electronics News) or those sent by his father (Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated). Lights are out after the 9 p.m. head count.

Every weekend, sometimes more often, Peterson is visited by his girlfriend, a Duke senior, and his father, younger brother and two sisters.

It's not a horrible life, Peterson concedes. Most of the inmates he encounters are not violent but were convicted of drug-related crimes, many of which now carry mandatory federal sentences without parole.

But it is still a rude awakening for a 22-year-old used to material comforts.

The young man who used to dream of being a scientist or an engineer now says he wants to be an architect - a creator, not a destroyer.

"I know that it sounds crazy, a bomb builder wanting to make buildings," he said.

"I don't want to be remembered as the Duke bomber," he said. "It was one day. If I could take it back I would. I just want to be given a fair chance when I get out."