Destroyer of Books Gets Stiff Sentence

By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

One of the most baffling chapters in Harvard library history came to a close on March 14, when a former library employee was sentenced to prison for destroying hundreds of books in Widener Library and Northeastern University's Snell Library.

Forty-two-year-old Stephen L. Womack, who worked as a casual employee in the Widener stacks from May 1989 to September 1990, received the maximum sentence of 7 to 10 years for his crimes. He will be on probation for 10 years after his release. Assistant District Attorney Anthony Gemma, who prosecuted the case, said this week that Womack is appealing the sentence.

Womack also stood trial in Middlesex Superior Court for a related count of extortion, but deliberations on that charge produced a hung jury. Womack had written threatening ransom notes but never collected the money left for him.

"We in the Library are mightily relieved that Mr. Womack was caught, convicted, and sentenced to a substantial prison term," said Sidney Verba, director of the University Library and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor. "He was a library terrorist."

The case, which began taking shape six years ago, drew on the combined resources of Harvard and Northeastern library and police officials, the Harvard General Counsel's Office, and the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office. Because of the scale of damage, Harvard Police called in the FBI in 1990 for assistance in background checks and sophisticated forensic analysis.

Lawrence Dowler, the College Library's associate librarian for public services, estimates that at Harvard alone, Womack destroyed "well over $180,000 worth of materials," some of them hard to replace.

No less costly was the toll Womack exacted on librarians' time, effort, morale, and sense of safety, Dowler said. By his estimates, two librarians worked the equivalent of six months full-time on the case. (The librarians who did the work were Gerald Schwertfeger, head of stacks and tracing services in Access Services; and Greer Gilman, a cataloger in the Preservation Services Department.)

The strange tale begins around academic year 1990-91, when book covers utterly stripped of pages began appearing on Widener shelves. "In the end, we discovered over 600 such books," Dowler said. "We turned the place upside down. It drove us crazy because we could never find any evidence of where the damage was occurring. We didn't even find any little pieces of books. The contents were simply removed -- mostly, sliced out.

"We also found a note that threatened physical violence to anybody who tried to apprehend the perpetrator. We took that seriously: we didn't know what we were dealing with."

As inventories turned up more and more stripped books, librarians noticed that the vandal favored texts in Latin and Greek by fathers of the early Christian Church as well as highly specialized texts on early Christianity in uncommon languages such as Icelandic. "We contacted other libraries and began to see a pattern of the same sort of thing happening over at Northeastern," Dowler explained. That connection cracked open the door to Womack's eventual day in court.

In the fall of 1994, the Harvard Police contacted their Northeastern counterparts and learned that a Stephen Womack had been arrested there for stealing chemistry books. Checking their own 1990 files, Harvard Police spotted an oddity: 13 chemistry texts figured among the mutilated materials.

"This provided one important link," according to Sgt. Kathleen Stanford, of the Harvard Police. Handwriting analysis of the extortion notes pointed to Womack as one possible suspect as well. Most tellingly of all, the notes bore several pseudonyms, including the names of Womack's former Widener supervisor and a Massachusetts judge who had sentenced Womack for an earlier crime. "All the pseudonyms had some meaning in his life," Stanford said.

Investigators eventually discovered that Womack had been haphazardly microfilming the stolen books in his basement. The microfilms clearly revealed identifying Harvard and Northeastern marks on the materials. Otherwise, the microfilms are essentially useless, Dowler said. The worst news for scholars is that Womack apparently destroyed or discarded the original texts.

Womack was finally arrested at his Arlington home on Dec. 14, 1994, and was convicted this year on Feb. 29. Lt. John F. Rooney and Detective Richard Maderos, both of the Harvard Police, were among those testifying at the trial.

Dowler was present for the March 14 sentencing and spoke afterwards with several others who attended. "For this kind of thing, everybody said it was a very substantial sentence. It sends a message that you can do some serious time if you get caught."

For the world's largest academic library system, the Womack case came as "a real wake-up call," Dowler said. "For years, we hadn't done as good a job at security as we should have."

Some of the library's security challenges arise from allowing user access to open stacks, a long-treasured privilege here. "Among the big metalibraries -- the New York Public, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque Nationale [Paris] -- we are the only open-stack library in the world, and we would like to preserve that feature," Dowler said.

"In a big library like this, you're always vulnerable, and there will always be minor vandalism. But we had not previously experienced anything so disturbing and destructive on such a massive scale. This was really an attack on the institution."

In recent years, officials have taken a variety of steps to raise library security here to levels typically found at other major research facilities. In December 1993, the College Library (home to two-thirds of the University Library's nearly 13 million books) began installing electronic book tags and checkout gates to supplement the sharp eyes of book checkers at library exits. The most vulnerable materials are now secured at the Harvard Depository in Southborough, Mass.

Last year, the College Library appointed Louis Derby as its first full-time security officer to develop and monitor procedures to make the libraries safer for the people who use them as well as for the materials they seek. Derby also collects reports about unusual library conditions that previously had no clear focal point for analysis and action. Odd patterns now have a better chance of being detected more quickly, Dowler said.

Because University-wide groups now share security information, individuals who behave unacceptably at a series of library units are less likely to fall through Harvard's decentralized cracks. In the past, Dowler said, separate units could be disrupted by the same person, but librarians might not suspect anything amiss until long after a few small misdeeds had become a larger, more serious problem. Another recent boon is BAMBAM, a national network for reporting library thefts.

"Nationally, I think there has been a real change over the past 10 years about library thefts, because it is a national problem," Dowler reflected. "As a result of some major thefts, including one at Oberlin some years ago, there was an effective campaign to get state legislatures to enact laws making book theft a serious crime. I think the Womack sentence is one result of that effort."