True Crime Campfire - Target: The Mysterious Bombing of Barry Hornstein

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Security expert Gavin de Becker wrote, “If we’re looking for some specific, expected danger, we’re less likely to see the unexpected danger.” It’s a trap we can easily fall into, especially the anxious ones among us—trying to plan and protect ourselves from every possible harm, only to find that the real danger comes when we least expect it, and from the last place we’d think to look. Join us for a classic whodunnit, a story of secrets, lies, and obsession--all leading to an explosive end. Sources:Willamette Week, Nick Budnick: https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-2343-pipe-nightmare.htmlNBC: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/love-triangle-leads-to-bombing/LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-09-mn-49483-story.htmlInvestigation Discovery's "Web of Lies," episode "Pipe Nightmare"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. True crime campfire, patron saint, and security expert, Gavin DeBecker wrote, If we're looking for some specific expected danger, we're less likely to see the unexpected danger. It's a trap we can easily fall into, especially the anxious ones among us, trying to plan and protect ourselves from any possible harm, only to find out the real danger comes when we least expect it, and from the last place we'd think to look.

This is Target, the mysterious bombing of Barry Hornstein. So, campers, for this one, we're in Laurelhurst, a pretty suburb of Portland, Oregon. On the morning of September 27, 2000, insurance agent Barry Hornstein was rushing to get to work. His routines were all a little off-kilter lately because he and his wife Kathy had just separated after almost two decades together. They had two kids, a teenage son and daughter. Their daughter was living with Kathy, and the son, Jack, was living with Barry. It wasn't the worst thing in the world. The separation was sad for everybody, but it had been pretty amicable so far,

but it was a big adjustment, of course, and Barry and 17-year-old Jack were still getting used to it being just the two of them. Jack had already seen himself off to school earlier that morning, but Barry found himself rushing a little to get out the door. He tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat of his car, turned the key in the the ignition, and then, in his rearview mirror, Barry caught sight of something weird in the driveway. He didn't want to run over it, whatever it was, so he hopped out and walked over for a closer look. It was a black thing, cylindrical, wrapped in what looked like electrical tape.

There were a few wires sticking out of one end, some kind of a toy, maybe, a tool that fell off a truck. He started to stoop down and pick it up, but something stopped him, some little warning voice at the back of his head. Instead, he leaned back a little bit and gently poked it with the toe of his shoe. And in that moment, the world exploded. His ears ringing, Barry found himself lying on his back on the ground in a mess of metal shards and glass. Somewhere, it sounded far, far away. He could hear his car alarm going off. And as he lifted his head off the ground, he caught sight of his own body. His pants were in shreds, and there was a growing pool of blood underneath him.

One of his legs, the one that had poked the strange object in the driveway, was horribly mangled. It's a bomb, Barry thought, bewildered. I've been bombed. He yelled weakly for help, but he didn't need to. Everybody within a three-mile radius had heard the explosion. In fact, a piece of shrapnel had crashed through a neighbor's window, and police and paramedics were already on the way. As he watched the ambulance lights approaching, Barry thought,

Is this it? Is this how I die? After that, he was in and out of consciousness for a while. At one point, he came out of it long enough to see a white-haired face staring down at him. It startled him, even as drugged up as he was by then. The man leaning over him was thin and stern-looking, dressed all in black. Barry had the thought, It's the grim reaper. But it wasn't. It was Detective William Law.

standing over his hospital bed. Mr. Hornstein, he said, Do you know who did this to you? Law hated to barge in on the doctors and their patient at a time like this, but everybody in the room knew Barry might not live through the day. This might be the detective's last chance to ask if Barry had any idea

who might have done this to him. Barry shook his head. No, no one. And that was just about all the detective had time to ask him right then. The doctors interrupted. They had something vital to discuss with their patient. Through a haze of medication and shock, Barry only half heard the awful words.

There's too much damage to the right leg. We're going to have to amputate. Do you understand, Mr. Hornstein? The surgeon asked. Barry nodded, but the truth was he didn't understand at all. He didn't understand why his world had just blown up around him, why any of this was happening. Barry just had time to see his wife, Kathy, before they took him into the operating room. She'd gotten the call at work and rushed to the hospital in a panic. She squeezed his hand as the orderlies rolled him away. She wasn't sure if she'd ever see him alive again. Back at the house, investigators were swarming all over the crime scene, which was sizable. They were finding bits of bomb all over the neighborhood for hundreds of feet square. This definitely didn't seem like a prank gone wrong

or anything like that. This was a powerful little bomb, and it seemed to have been strategically placed to blow Barry Hornstein all the way to hell. Somebody had been trying to kill him. Oh, yeah, and whoever did it had some skills. This wasn't the kind of pipe bomb some newbie amateur we would put together. It was pretty sophisticated. A six-inch steel pipe stuffed full of explosive with a battery to facilitate detonation. The pipe was also packed full of ball bearings for maximum damage.

And it had little magnets attached to the outside, probably to attach it to the underside of a car. the forensic text thought, even though Barry'd found it in the driveway. With the police at his house, his mom in tears, and his dad fighting for his life in surgery, 17-year-old Jack Hornstein sat down with detectives in a private room at a school. Jack said he hadn't seen the bomb in the driveway when he left for school that morning. He hadn't seen anything strange at all. It was just a normal morning. Jack told Detective Law that he couldn't imagine why anybody would target his dad like this. But the thing was, mild-mannered insurance guy Barry had a secret or two.

Not so much about work. He handled insurance policies for the restaurant industry. I mean, for sure, he had some big high-dollar accounts, but it wasn't the kind of job that usually got a lot of blood enemies after you. Barry's work life was pretty normal, but remember how we told you that he and his wife had just gotten separated? Well, the reason for that was Barry had himself a gambling problem. A pretty serious one.

Serious enough that it ended his marriage anyway. He'd gamled away the family savings account. $200,000. Oh my God. He and Kathy went to counseling about it for over a year, but finally Kathy just decided she couldn't take it anymore. She was fed up with his repeated lies and promises to get the problem under control. He'd swear he stopped and she'd find evidence that he hadn't.

It was too much, and she and their daughter moved out. This info got Detective Law Spidey Sense's twang in on multiple levels. How many times have we seen gambling addictions pop up in true crime stories? Many, many. Oh, yeah. And a recent separation from a probably pissed off wife, that's a red flag, too. So Detective Law sat Kathy down for an interview. He wanted to know if Barry had a life insurance policy, and if so, who was the beneficiary?

Kathy knew immediately what he was implying by that, and she was pissed. Look, she told them. It's not like that. We're separated, but I still care about Barry. We're still close. I had nothing to do with this. It's got to be the gambling. Maybe a hate crime? Barry's Jewish.

There was no indication of that, though. With a hate crime, the perp usually does something to make the motive clear, sends a letter, spray paints something awful at the scene, contacts the media, takes credit, whatever. there was nothing like that here. Like, racists love attention. There's one thing I know about racists. It's that they love attention. Jesus.

So the gambling problem. When Barry was out of surgery and able to talk, they asked him about it. Barry seemed sheepish about the whole thing. He admitted he had a problem and he was working on it. But a few minutes into the conversation, Detective Law started to realize that unless Barry was hiding something and it did not seem like he was, the gambling angle. wasn't going to lead anywhere. See, Barry's problem was with online poker. It wasn't like he was getting involved in CD backroom card games. This was all on the internet. And Barry said he never

borrowed money from loan sharks or anything like that. Yeah, he just bled his own family savings account dry. If anybody was going to break his kneecaps, it would have been Cassie, and she just kicked his ass out of the house instead. So what the hell? Why had somebody, somebody with more than a passing level of bomb-making skill, which is, you know, not a thing you find on most people's resumes, targeted this guy. So far, Detective Law wasn't finding anything he could use, which was weird. I mean, in all their combined years of experience, Detective Law and his colleagues had never seen a single case where the victim or their family had no idea who did it. Usually, there'd be a prime suspect from minute one, but the Hornstein seemed genuinely baffled at what was happening

to them. And so did their neighbors and friends. Everybody seemed to like Barry. They described him as a nice guy, totally on the up and up in his business dealings. But some of the kids at Jack's school were giving the investigators some interesting intel. Apparently Jack had fallen in with the proverbial wrong crowd a while back. Jack had always been a quiet kid, kind of shy despite being a linebacker on the football team, and at some point he'd started acting out a little. Cruising around downtown, egg in people's houses. There was some unspecified badness with a paintball gun at one point. Another time, one of Jack's new friends stole Kathy's golf clubs out of the house. Somebody broke into Jack's car, too. And there was some bad blood between Jack and an ex-girlfriend. Not that any of this was

that unusual for teenage kids, except for this. For about two months leading up to the bombing, somebody had been putting flyers under people's windshield wipers in the high school parking lot. accusing Jack of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Now, nobody knew who it was, or what their motivation was. The wording on the flyers suggested it was the victim's older sibling, but Jack said he had no idea what girl they were talking about. He'd never assaulted anyone, and his girlfriend was 15 and lived in Washington State. Most people the detective spoke to figured Jack's ex was the one leaving the flyers,

but when they talked to her, she denied it, and she definitely didn't seem like somebody who'd be likely to have secret bomb-making skills, I mean, she was a high school girl. That's not on the typical CV. The Flyers had really upset Jack, as they would anybody, and his mom and dad had been really worried about him. He'd always been kind of a quiet kid,

but now he was just in his room most of the time, on his computer, barely saying a word to anybody. But one bright spot in Jack's life was his girlfriend, Cindy. He'd met her online. She lived about a three-hour drive away in Kennewick, Washington, but they got to see each other now and then when their parents could drive them.

Like Jack, Cindy was smart and had a ton of athletic talent, plus she was pretty and funny and outgoing. She brought Jack out of his shell a little bit. Kathy and Barry hadn't really approved of the relationship at first. I mean, Cindy was 15 and Jack was 17 and they worried a little bit about the age difference. But according to Willamette Weekly, which was one of our main sources for this case, when Jack and Cindy met up in person and Jack's parents met Cindy's mom, they all liked each other a lot. And before long, all the parents came around about the relationship. The two kids seemed to really care about each other.

They talked all the time over text and phone. And, I mean, at the end of the day, what kind of shenanigans were they really going to get into living 200 miles apart? You know, it's really kind of perfect when you thought about it. Cindy, of course, was baffled when Jack told her about the weird flyers that had started appearing around the school. They talked about it a lot. They both figured it was probably Jack's ex-girlfriend,

who was still holding a serious grudge about their breakup. Cindy had been trying hard to keep her boyfriend's spirits up, and now this, a bomb. Nobody could have seen it coming. Detective Law was intrigued about the flyers. When he dug into it, he found that various students at Jack's high school had gotten anonymous email saying Jack had assaulted an underage girl and encouraging them to post flyers about it around town. So whoever was spreading this rumor had managed to get a whole little squad of Jack's classmates to do the dirty work for them. Oh, that's clever. It is creepy, too. Yeah. Now, I know y'all went to high school, so I know we

don't have to tell you that ever since those emails and flyers started popping up, the gossip mill had been churnin' like mad. Some people believe Jack must have done what he was being accused of. Other people felt like it was just a malicious prank. What Detective Law felt was that the bomber he was looking for might have blown up the wrong guy. It seemed to him that Barry might not have been the target at all. Could the bomb have been meant for Jack? Barry had found the bomb in the driveway, right, where Jack usually parked his car. But Jack said he didn't think so.

It had to be about his dad's gambling, he said. As he put it, how he'd been pissing money away. He must owe some bad people. There was one other possibility, too, of course. maybe Jack was the bomber himself. Barry had gambled away the family savings, presumably torpedoing any semblance of a college fund for Jack and a sister, and driving their mom away.

His addiction had destroyed the family. How had the separation hit Jack? Had that, combined with the added stress of this weird smear campaign against him, made Jack snap and take out his rage on his father? Kathy was outraged at the idea. Of course, it wasn't Jack. Kid did not have a violent bone in his body. He'd never hurt his dad in a million years.

And Jack insisted that he didn't resent his dad. I mean, he'd picked Barry to live with after the separation. He could have lived with his mom if he wanted to. Jack loved his dad. He had nothing to do with this, he said, and he had no idea who did. But Detective Law was skeptical that Jack was as clueless about the whole thing as he claimed to be. He had a feeling the kid knew more than he was telling. And he told him so.

And then, about a week after the bombing, Jack got an anonymous letter from someone claiming to be the bomber. Sorry about your dad, the writer said. The bomb was supposed to be for you. And the note once again accused him of assaulting an underage girl. You would think you could find some nice girl your own age, the bomber wrote, instead of messing around with little girls that don't know better and listen to your lies. Jack took the letter to the cops, who sent it off to the forensic lab immediately. but no joy. The writer hadn't left any fingerprints or DNA for them to find. The same was true of the bomb itself, by the way. No prints, no DNA, nothing they could use. It was incredibly

frustrating. And for Jack's parents, the anonymous letter was the final straw. Barry was still in the hospital trying to recover from having his right leg amputated. Something I imagine is as hard on a person's psyche as it is on their body. He later told Willamette Weekly that he'd never felt so helpless in his life, stuck in a hospital bed while his kid's life was at stake. Kathy was distraught too, and she made an executive decision. Jack was going to go to Washington to stay with Cindy for a few days. Up till now, Jack and Cindy only got to see each other once every couple months, so even though the circumstances were horrific, they were finally going to get a chance

to spend some real time together. Jack arrived in Kennewick on October 6th, a little less than two weeks after the bombing. Cindy's mom, who sounds like a badass, by the way, single mom working like three jobs to support her kids, welcomed him with open arms, and told him he had to sleep on the couch. Cindy's family was having a cookout that weekend, and he got to go to a school dance with her, and for a while, Jack was finally able to just play in the yard with his girlfriend and her family and her dogs and get his mind off bombs and threats and danger for the first time in weeks. It was a fun time, but the fun didn't last. On Sunday morning, Cindy's brother was outside shooting hoops when he spotted something.

out of place in the yard. It was a pipe. Wrapped in duct tape, with a note taped to the side and a fuse sticking out of one end. In clunky, ungrammatical Spanish, the note said, If you find this, please give it back to Jack Hornstein. Cindy's brothers stumbled back from the thing and bolted back into the house. The Kennewick police showed up with the bomb squad all ready to go, but fortunately for everybody, this bomb was a fake.

There was no gunpowder in it. But when they told the police about the real bombing back at Jack's house in Oregon, it got their attention in no uncertain terms, and they assigned a detective to try and figure out who'd left the dummy bomb in Cindy's yard. Somehow, the bomber had managed to find Jack, hundreds of miles away from home. If the Hornstein's were worried before, now they were terrified. Poor Kathy found out about the hoax bomb on the news, which goes to show how considerate teenagers can be of their parents, you know.

must have been beyond awful for her and she called Jack immediately and ordered him back home if nowhere was safe if this psychopath could find them anywhere she wanted her boy back home in Oregon with her and as the investigation limped along and Barry fought his way back to health in the hospital

the Hornsteins existed in a special kind of hell they jumped at every noise every time they had to drive somewhere they wondered is there a bomb under the car is this the day I die and they weren't the only ones under the mad bomber's shadow. Just a couple days after the hoax bomb turned up in Cindy's yard, the detective assigned to the case in her hometown of Kennewick Washington got a creepy voicemail.

In a ridiculous, cartoony Latin accent, like speedy Gonzales crossed with the Taco Bell Chihuahua, the caller told Detective Taylor to count his days. He better back off the case or he was a dead man. A few days after that, Cindy's mom got a letter from the bomber. this is to let you know that Jack Hornstein is a marked man the letter said

I don't want your daughter to get hurt but what happens will happen shit scared Cindy's mom so badly she told her she couldn't see Jack anymore which I mean who can blame her but Cindy was devastated furious this wasn't Jack's fault

somebody was out to get him and it wasn't fair he needed her more than ever now Cindy said she and some of the other kids at her school had been getting weird emails too like the ones Jack's classmates in Oregon had gotten, accusing him of being a sick pervert, a sex abuser. It wasn't true, Cindy said. She knew it wasn't.

Detective Taylor asked her if she or any of her friends knew who was behind the emails, but they said they had no idea. The investigators, both in Washington and Oregon, were getting seriously pissed. Who the hell was this guy a ghost? So far, he'd given them exactly zero they could use to find him. And although it certainly looked like Jack was the one in the Bomber's crosshairs, Detective Law still had a nagging suspicion that something more might be going on,

that Jack might not be as innocent as he claimed to be. So he brought Jack in for more questioning and a polygraph test, which he failed miserably. Kathy was shocked. She'd given permission for them to question her kid because she was so confident he was innocent. She was still confident, but now the investigators were given Jack the side eye. Jack must have planted the bomb, then put a fake one. in Cindy's yard and wrote the anonymous letters to make it look like he was the target and throw off the case. And the side eye intensified when Jack admitted that he and his friends had looked up bomb-making

tutorials online. But it wasn't a big deal, Jack said. It was just for fun. They weren't really going to build explosives. They were just, you know, into military stuff. They just wanted to understand how it works. They looked up a lot of other stuff, too, like about fighter jets and tanks, not just bombs. Yeah. Right. Detective Law didn't want to think that this kid had tried to blow up his dad, but so far this was the only theory that made sense to him. He got a search warrant for Jack's computer and the forensic IT folks went to work on it. They did find the searches Jack was talking about, but among the bomb stuff was the military stuff he'd mentioned. More importantly, there was

nothing on Jack's computer that suggested he'd sent those creepy emails. And when they brought him in for a second polygraph, Jack passed it, no problem. There's a reason polygraphs aren't admissible in court most of the time. They're about as trustworthy as your high school classmates' Facebook feed. The best we can really say about them is, sometimes they work. Right? In this case, they didn't. Jack Hornstein had been through more in the past few weeks than most people go through in a lifetime, and the kid was freaked out to the core of his soul. Plus, he was a teenager, going through all the weird emotional and hormonal stuff we go through at that age. He was a shitty candidate for a polygraph in the first place. Detective Law was finally satisfied. Jack wasn't

involved in the bombing. Jack was most likely the target himself, but of course that left the investigation back at Square One and Jack's life still in danger. Barry and Kathy were determined to protect him. They made arrangements to pull him out of school for the rest of the quarter and send him to live with his uncle in Seattle. Since the bomber had managed to find him at Cindy's place in Kennewick, the family told almost nobody about the plan. The only person Jack told was Cindy. She was kind of excited, like, hey, maybe I can come busy on weekend sometimes. Jack and his parents felt good about the plan, and Jack set about getting his stuff packed and ready to go.

And then a couple days later, Jack clicked open an email from an address he didn't recognize. It was the bomber. And somehow, he knew about Seattle. I know where you're going, he taunted, and you won't be safe there. Now, the only person in the world who knew Jack was going to Seattle, apart from his parents, and the uncle he was going to be staying with, was Cindy. They hadn't told anyone else. Kathy's blood ran cold, and Jack was stunned, speechless. What the hell was going on here?

For Jack, the idea that his girlfriend, who'd been his only source of comfort over the past few months, might somehow be involved in this, was torture. What the Hornsteins didn't yet know was that detectives had been working on tracing the emails some of Cindy's classmates had received from the bomber up in Washington. One of them, one that happened to be full of specifics about the bomb, stuff that only the bomber would know, had come from an AOL account that weirdly linked to a snail mail address in Florida. But when they dug into it further to find the credit card used to pay for the account, that led them much closer to home. specifically to Port Orchard, Washington, and a guy named Timothy Goff. When they asked Cindy about it, she seemed confused. She dated a Tim for a while before she started going out with Jack, she told them, but that was a while ago and the guy had moved away.

She didn't even know where he lived now. And that couldn't be the same guy with the AOL account. Cindy's ex-boyfriend Tim was a high school kid. This Timothy Goff was a 41-year-old adult. A quick background check on Goff didn't turn up anything sketchy. He had no criminal record, he had a good-paying job as a pipe fitter, he had a nice house and a college-age daughter, he and his wife Patty were recently separated,

his brother was a city planner in Portland, just, you know, a dude. What possible connection could he have to the Hornsteins? Detective Law was determined to find out, so 27 days after the bombing, he drove up to Port Orchard to knock on Goff's front door. Goff, a big heavy-set beardy guy, was friendly enough willing to invite Law in and answer his questions, but what struck

the detective from the start was that Goff didn't ask him why he was there. And when Law told him he was investigating a bombing in Portland, Oregon, Goff said he thought he might have seen it on the news. No, why are you asking me about that? Suspish. And he balked at letting Law look at his computer,

said they'd have to get a warrant for that. Goff said he thought he thought he did know a girl named Cindy. He'd met her in a chat room on the internet a while back and exchanged a few messages back and forth, but that was all it was. He'd never met her in person or anything like that. Detective Law wasn't buying it. There was something about this guy that was making his skin crawl. He got a search warrant for Goff's apartment and a team of CSIs descended on the place. Right away, they found some stuff that made their antennae twitch. Wire, a battery like the one they found in the pipe bomb, a pipe wrench, a 45 Ruger. They also noted that Goff had an elaborate

computer system, much more elaborate than the average person would have. When Law asked him if he'd ever used the screen name Shan One Here, he said, nope, and if somebody was posing as him with that name, then it must be a hacker. Mm-hmm. Seems legit. And their eyebrows hit the ceiling when they searched under Goff's bed and found a box full of porn, mostly of the barely legal teenage girl genre, ropes, tampons, what, and VHS tapes. Who's on here, Timothy? Detective Law called out. Anybody I'm going to recognize? Not unless you know any of my ex-girlfriends, Goff said. Cocky. But he didn't stay that way long, especially once they searched his wallet and found a bunch of what you could only call stalking notes.

full of details about Cindy and her family, and Jack Hornstein, too. Mr. Goff, you know we're going to watch these tapes, Detective Law said. You might as well tell us what we're going to see. Goff was quiet for a long moment, and then he sighed, Okay, okay, he said, it's me and Cindy. And so it was. Goff had made homemade sex tapes of himself abusing Cindy, who had been only 14 years old at the time.

Ugh. They met online around Halloween of 1999. He told her he was 30, she said she was 16. Siddi was a high-achieving popular kid, but she was also home alone a lot. Her mom was busting her butt to keep a roof over their heads, and as essential as that is, it can leave a kid kind of directionless sometimes, hungry for attention. And a predator like Timothy Goff can smell that a mile away. He was a natural at love bombing.

He showered Cindy with compliments and affection. For their first in-person date, he took her to a hotel for sex, and over the next couple months, he kept up a constant flood of attention and gifts, jewelry and pretty clothes. But after a while, Cindy started to get a little skeved out. Tim was getting way too intense, way too fast. Plus, it was stressful having to hide the relationship from her mom. She broke it off with Goff in April of 2000.

Later, she told Detective Taylor, he had stronger feelings for me than I. I had for him. He'd even been planning to move to Kennewick to be near her. That was way too much. Ugh. Cindy, by the way, isn't her real name. That name was kept out of the sources we saw since she was underage and the victim of a sexual predator. And that's totally appropriate. So we didn't have any interest into digging into that. Right. None of this is remotely her fault. Let's let her have privacy. So Cindy's the name the Willamette Weekly used for her in their article on the case. So we just went with Cindy.

Anyway, so she broke things off with Timothy Goff, but they stayed friends, friends. And Timothy stayed obsessed. When Cindy started dating Jack Hornstein, she told him all about it, and Timothy just couldn't handle it. His marriage had blown up, he'd become totally fixated on this girl, and he became even more unhinged than he already was. Yeah, evidently, one of his friends later told the press that Goff seemed like a pretty chill dude most of the time, but he did have a tendency to get obsessive.

Like when he got laid off from a job a few months before he met Cindy. He just couldn't let it go, his friend said, talked about it incessantly. If I were his boss, I'd feel like I dodged a bullet. Or a bomb. Or a bomb. In his messages to Cindy, he played the supportive friend, pretending to be cool with her new relationship while pumping her for information about Jack and his family. And Cindy, without realizing the danger, told him plenty.

She had no idea he was using that. Intel to spy on and harass the hornsteins. Goff's first plan was the smear campaign against Jack. He sent out a flood of emails accusing Jack of being a predator, a rapist, and abuser of underage girls. Which pot meet kettle if pot was projecting their own crimes out of the kettle and the pot actually wanted to get Kettle's underage girlfriend back. And, okay, this metaphor got away from me a little. I'm sorry. Yeah, it is like mad projection. No, that would be you.

Jack's 17. You're the 41-year-old, you freaking creep. He's such a, God, his plans are stupid, too. Yeah. He managed to get enough people behind the cause that those flyers started popping up around the high school. And he made sure to distribute the emails to Cindy's friends and family, too, to cover his bases on both sides. When that didn't work, it was on to plan B. B for bomb.

When the forensics text searched Goff's computer, they found deleted searches for bomb. making instructions, and a search for the schematics on the exact kind of car Jack drove. Goff was trying to figure out how to wire the bomb right into the car so it would go off when Jack turned the key in the ignition. They also found keyword searches for murder, bomb, how to kill with bomb. Yikes. And of course, they found the emails, not to mention some handwritten drafts. When detectives questioned Goff about all this, he denied that he had anything to do with the bombing, but Cindy said she'd started to suspect he might be involved,

especially when the fake bomb turned up at her house and when some emails popped up with information she hadn't told anyone else but him. She just wasn't sure what to do about it. She was a scared kid and her mom didn't know anything about Timothy Goff. Neither did her friends, for the most part. During the time she was seeing Timothy, she told them her new boyfriend was 19. So Cindy kept quiet about it,

as kids can tend to do when they're scared, just hoping maybe she was a little. wrong and this could all go away, poor kid. The evidence on Goff's computer was plenty for an attempted murder charge. And the tapes he made of himself abusing Cindy, that was enough to charge him with the rape of a child. In jail waiting for trial, he did what so many

geniuses before him have done and decided to confide in his new bestest bud about all the fun bomb-making knowledge he had. The cellmate, of course, went straight to the detectives and told him all about it and became a solid gold witness for the prosecution. Say it with me again, y'all. Your cellmate ain't your new best friend. For God's sake.

Goff's defense team tried its damnedest to get the computer evidence thrown out, but no dice. And at that point, our boy must have known he was six kinds of fucked. In September of 2004, four years after the bombing of Barry Hornstein, Goff pled guilty to attempted murder and accepted a 12-year sentence. He also got a 26-month sentence for sex crimes against a child, pathetic. if you ask me, years less than he deserved for targeting Cindy and exploiting her vulnerability to satisfy his own gross urges. And I hate to say this, but he's out now, free and clear, which is creepy.

He's in his 60s today and hopefully not going anywhere near any underage girls. I feel bad for his wife and daughter. I can't even imagine what this must have been like for them. Cindy and Jack kept dating for a while after the bombing, but eventually as teenage relationships tend to do, it fizzled out and they split up and went on to new things. Cindy graduated from high school with a scholarship to college, got engaged and moved on with her life.

We hope she's doing great. As for Jack, he went on first to a job as a counselor for troubled kids, then to join the Portland PD along with his sister Betsy. Sometimes with a traumatic event, you get a little silver lining too, and in Barry Hornstein's case, he got a big shiny one. As he fought his way through all the physical therapy he had to do to learn to walk on a prosthetic leg and all this psychological trauma

of nearly being murdered, like breaking into a cold sweat at the sight of a paper bag on the ground next to his car, Barry and his ex-wife Kathy started to get close again. And before long, they were back together. Barry told Willamette Weekly

that it made the nightmare worth it for him. He said the bomb made their family whole again. ironic, isn't it? That what was supposed to blow them to pieces actually brought them back together instead. Hear that, Mr. Gough? Hornstein's 1, U.0. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week.

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