Betty Brown Casey, a wealthy Montgomery County landowner and widow of a multimillionaire builder and political activist, survived an attempt on her life Monday night when a bomb planted in her Mercedes-Benz exploded, according to investigators.
The blast heavily damaged the car, but Casey suffered only a facial cut and her personal secretary, who was driving, suffered a slight hand injury.
Casey, 62, is the widow of Eugene B. Casey, who was once an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eugene Casey also was a Democratic activist in Maryland who was president of a racetrack that figured prominently in the public corruption trial of former governor Marvin Mandel.
Authorities said the explosion about 5 p.m. Monday appeared to have come from a homemade pipe bomb planted in the rear of Betty Casey's car and detonated electrically.
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The blast came as Casey and her secretary were returning home from a shopping trip. The car was a short distance from Casey's $1 million home on Beall Creek Court in Potomac.
Montgomery police said last night they were investigating the blast as an attempt to kill Casey. They would not comment on a possible motive for the bombing.
There were conflicting reports on whether Casey was in the front or back seat and whether the bomb was planted in the trunk or elsewhere in the car's rear section.
One law enforcement official said the women may have been saved by "a structural feature" behind the back seat of the Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL that is designed to protect occupants if the car is struck from the rear.
"Mercedes ought to make a commercial out of this," he said. "This bomb could have killed them both. This bomb blew the whole rear end off a big heavy Mercedes."
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The car's fuel tank did not explode, but the official said the bomber may not have intended for it to explode.
The official, asking not to be identified, said explosives specialists with the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are looking into the possibility that the bomb was intended to "make a neat little hole {in the back seat} and waste everyone on the other side of that hole."
"You can aim a bomb like a gun," he said.
He said investigators, after sifting through the wreckage of the car's rear end, believe the bomb was a length of pipe about a foot long, filled with explosive material, capped at both ends and wired to batteries.
It detonated as the car was turning onto Beall Spring Road from River Road, toward Casey's home in the Beallmount neighborhood near the Potomac River, a pricey subdivision of ranch- and colonial-style homes with expansive lawns.
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Neither Casey nor her secretary, Sandra Philsinger, 40, of Germantown, needed hospital treatment for their injuries, officials said.
According to Maryland state records, Casey owns in her own name about two dozen parcels of property in Montgomery that are assessed for tax purposes at more than $25 million, but the full extent of her fortune could not be determined yesterday. She also owns her late husband's company, Casey Engineering, a design contractor based in Gaithersburg.
She was the second wife of Eugene B. Casey, who died in 1986 at age 82. A family member said yesterday they were married for more than 25 years, and had no children. Casey's late husband had four daughters and two sons by his first marriage.
Eugene Casey, a Democratic activist and an agricultural adviser to Roosevelt, amassed huge real estate holdings in Montgomery after World War II, a period in which land values in the Washington suburbs began a dramatic rise.
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In 1946, Casey was charged with evading $70,000 in federal income taxes during his White House years. He served five months in prison.
Casey had substantial holdings in the Rockville-Gaithersburg area, where he built low-cost housing in the 1950s and 1960s and was among the first to build large apartment projects in Montgomery.
During Mandel's corruption trial in the late 1970s, Casey figured in news accounts as the self-described front man for a group of Mandel's friends who had purchased the Marlboro racetrack.
Staff writers Jo-Ann Armao and Sue Anne Pressley contributed to this report.
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