Eric Muenter - Wikipedia
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The Erich Muenter Saga
It began with a suspicious death on April 16, 1906. The dead woman was Leona Krembs Muenter, wife of Harvard lecturer, Erich Muenter. Muenter, who received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1899 was described as a tall,...
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So, let's say that ITTL, Muenter succeeded in placing his package, containing three sticks of dynamite with a timing mechanism set for nearly midnight on July 2nd 1915, in the Senate Chamber of the United States Capitol as he'd originally intended, rather than settling for leaving it under a telephone switchboard in the Senate reception room as he had to IOTL. Then, had placed his pencil bomb timed explosive aboard the SS Minnehaha close enough to the munitions to set them off when it explodes ITTL (on July 8th); and after that, managed to not only force entry into J.P. Morgan Jr's Long Island mansion on July 3rd as he did IOTL, but to shoot J.P. Morgan Jr dead on the staircase and subsequently escaped the mansion (rather than only managing to get off two shots, striking Morgan in the groin and thigh, after J.P Morgan Jr's wife, Jane Norton, had thrown herself in the way to block off Muenter's line of fire to her husband, before Morgan tackled him to the ground, twisted one of Muenter's twin revolvers out of his hand while his wife and children grabbed the other, and Morgan's butler proceeded to knock Muenter unconscious by bashing his head in with a lump of coal).
And that, as such, Muenter had made it back to the bungalow which he'd rented out in NYC (Bethpage), and collected the trunk he'd placed in storage there; which, upon tracking it down IOTL, Inspector of Combustibles Owen Egan declared to be "the greatest equipment for bomb making ever brought to New York", containing 134 sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, coils of fuse, batteries, nitric acid, windproof matches, mercury fulminate and smokeless explosive powder- along with three explosive tin can bombs which he'd already completed prior to his attack on the Morgan estate, and a handwritten letter addressed to “His Majesty the German Kaiser”, signed "R. Pearce", similarly to the letter which he'd mailed out to The Washington Star immediately after placing his first bomb in the Capitol.
After doing all of that, how much longer could Muenter have continued to evade the authorities, before being tracked down and either apprehended or killed? How much more havoc, damage and terror might he have been able to wreak, on his continued mad bombing and/or shooting spree, before being stopped? And how much greater an impact might his actions have potentially had on the course of history- for instance, could Muenter's bombing and killing spree have potentially been enough to bring the USA into WW1 on the side of the Allies in their own right, almost two years earlier than IOTL? How much greater might the resulting anti-German backlash in the United States wind up being ITTL than IOTL? And on a more frivolous note, with Muenter's attempt to kill J.P. Morgan Jr purportedly having been one of the primary influences for Batman/Bruce Wayne's origin story, how different might the portrayals of Batman (and The Joker) wind up being ITTL? What do you think?
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