Boy builder of ‘fiendishly elegant bombs’ jailed

Press, 21 July 1978, Page 5

Boy builder of ‘fiendishly elegant bombs’ jailed

NZPA London Six concurrent life sentences have been passed on a brilliant English schoolboy scientist who turned firebomber "to purge the land of evil.” The Old Bailey heard that Thomas David Lascelles, aged 18, of Croydon, South London, had told detectives he had an obsession and hatred for pro-abortionists. The Recorder (Senior Magistrate) of London (Mr James Miskin, Q.C.), told Lascelles: “Your fiendishly elegant bombs might have killed people.” Lascelles pleaded guilty to four offences of damaging property by fire between November 5 and 28 last year, causing explosives to be received on December 14 by Mrs Susan Lord at her home with intent to cause grievous harm to her and, between December 29 and January 1 this year, placing an explosive device at the Horsham premises of

Action Research for the Crippled Child. He asked for six other offences to be considered. Before being sentenced, Lascelles told the court: “I am thankful that I was arrested when I was, otherwise I might have gone on and committed other serious offences.” Lascelles was said to have told the police that he made the explosives from chemicals taken from school or bought at the chemist’s, and that his knowledge of chemistry and physics came from A-level school examination study. Mr David Jeffreys, prosecuting, said that when the police arrested Lascelles an January 10, they found a journal in his room recording every incident

Mr Jeffreys said that on November 5 the caretaker of the family-planning clinic at St James Road, Croydon, heard the noise of breaking glass, found the door ablaze, and put out the fire.

On November 5, Lascelles wrote: “Realising the significance of the date, I filled a sack with old rags and petrol, and placed it by the door of the house where contraceptives were dispensed and set it alight “I would purge the land of all evil if I had the strength. Later, I thanked God for safe return home.”

Mrs Lord, who lived with her family in Surrey, was active in supporting legal abortion locally, her views being fairly well publicised. On November 10, a half-brick wrapped in material was thrown through the window into her living room.

Lascelles’s journal said: “I could not have completed my noble mission without the blessing of God.”

He told the police that he selected Mrs Lord because in the past she had often called for abortion to be made more freely available in Croydon.

He did not stay to see how much damage was done but when nothing appeared in the press about it, he attacked the house a second time.

The journal recorded: “I waited until the lights went out and then hurled a bottle through the window. I can only hope that my mission has been a success.”

Again, there was no mention in the press so Lascelles sent a parcel bomb of his own design to Mrs Lord.

She was suspicious and left it in the garden and phoned the police.

The device, which contained 560 g of home-made gunpowder, should have been activated by a lightsensitive cell which was fixed to the top of the lid and linked by a circuit and battery to the gunpowder. According to an explosives expert, the device could have caused severe injury or death, and w’as a comparatively rare device.