Nabbing Kaczynski
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Photo by Sara R. Gale |
| Burns and McDaniel visit the cabin where Kaczynski was first interrogated after his arrest. |
Burns, McDaniel and Noel meet at Gehring’s small sawmill office at the foot of the road leading to Kaczynski’s cabin. Gehring and his wife, Wendy, are also there, still under the impression that Kaczynski is wanted for mailing threatening letters.
Burns isn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, a move he later can’t explain. Shuffling around the small office, they go over their plan, waiting for the SWAT team to get in place.
They wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At about 10:30 a.m., they file out of the office, murmuring. Get Kaczynski out of the cabin. Take him down. Grab him and yank him out of the cabin if necessary. Otherwise, rush into the cabin and tackle him. Burns and McDaniel will grab Kaczynski. Noel will cover them.
As they drive up Stemple Pass Road in McDaniel’s white Ford Bronco, turning left onto the unpaved road to Kaczynski’s cabin, Burns is thinking.
Now, there are 60 FBI agents, and I’m the one who’s going to knock on the door. Either I’m really smart or I’m really dumb.
Up the road, a snow embankment blocks the way. They get out and continue on foot. It’s snowy and cold up here. Really good thing about the wool pants. His breath puffs in little clouds, getting more rapid as he climbs farther up.
Nearing the cabin, Burns shouts. Ted! Ted! Anyone here?
His voice echoes along the mini-valley in which Kaczynski’s cabin stands.
Don’t stop moving. They had agreed they wouldn’t slow down while approaching the cabin.
Burns keeps shouting. Ted! You home?
Crunch, crunch, crunch go their boots.
Burns’ ears pick up some scurrying from inside the cabin.
Ted! Are you here?
By now, they are right up by the cabin door with only the thick-trunk trees, the creek and the mountain to their backs. They surround the front door area: Noel with his tax records, McDaniel with surveying ribbon and Burns with the clipboard. Burns hopes the SWAT team is in place around the national forest boundary.
Ted?
The door jerks open.
Kaczynski sticks his head out and leans cautiously, looking suspiciously at them and saying nothing. Shabby, wild hair, wild eyes. But he doesn’t come out. And one hand stays behind the door while the other rests on the door sill.
Can you show us your corners? Burns asks. He tries to appear nonchalant, but that hand behind the door …
Kaczynski doesn’t move. He looks at their survey vests, hand still behind the door.
Burns feels the adrenaline. This is it.
Suddenly, he surges forward and grabs the hand resting on the sill. With a strong jerk, Burns tugs Kaczynski straight out the door. He doesn’t weigh much; he’s been surviving on snowshoe rabbits for the last three months.
Burns twists Kaczynski’s arm into a wrist lock while McDaniel assists with a hand lock. Kaczynski squirms and struggles, as anyone would who was just captured. It isn’t aggression, Burns realizes, but instinct.
We’ve got a search warrant! Noel announces to a still struggling Kaczynski.
Ted, if you act like a gentleman, we’ll treat you like one, Burns says.
Kaczynski goes limp. Picking him up, Burns fastens his Forest Service handcuffs on Kaczynski. The men start walking.
Can I go inside and get some better shoes? Kaczynski asks. The road and forest are slushy with snow.
Burns looks at Kaczynski’s homemade slippers.
No, he says.
Down they go to a small cabin that the FBI had rented for interrogation, with Kaczynski shuffling in his black shirt and pants and homemade slippers. No one speaks.
The men sit him down while the search warrant team goes into Kaczynski’s cabin. At the interrogation cabin, Kaczynski refuses to talk about being the Unabomber, so they talk about hunting.
The ruse you pulled on me was the only one that would’ve worked, Kaczynski says.
Burns and McDaniel stand on the front porch. They don’t move or talk. Then they look at each other.
That went really good, Burns says.
***
The events of the day seemed a blur. At about 11:30 a.m., Burns headed back to the sawmill office and called King.
It just went down, Burns said.
You arrest a Freeman? King asked.
No, Burns said. I just took down the Unabomber.
When he got back to the Forest Service office at lunchtime, Burns found his wife, who had been wondering and waiting.
We got him, Burns said simply.
The Forest Service became integral to the case afterwards. The search team found Kaczynski’s diaries detailing his actions in the mountains, from hunting illegal grouse to setting up tripwires for motorcyclists and mailing bombs.
Burns and other Forest Service officers worked on the diaries every day for the summer. They solved a lot of old cases in the forest that summer, one involving a heavily vandalized cabin near Kaczynski’s property. A summer home, the cabin was owned by an out-of-state couple. Although a deputy sheriff had once questioned Kaczynski, nothing was ever proven. Kaczynski described the incident in his diary as his destruction of “the pretentious cabin.”
Later, Burns would hear the chilling details of how close he and the others came to danger, with guns hanging on nails behind the door that Kaczynski could’ve easily grabbed. Kaczynski also had a suicide ring that could’ve been rigged to a bomb, which he planned to pull if the law came.
As he and other Forest Service agents dug through the diaries, Burns began to see Kaczynski as a wayward adolescent, setting up hideaway spots in the forest and acting out against whatever angered him – trying to chop down a power pole or hanging a rope from a “lookout” tree to spy on neighbors and hikers.
Burns traveled to Sacramento to be interviewed as a witness for the case in spring of 1997. When the trial began, he bought a plane ticket to testify, but the trial was postponed. A week later, Burns bought a second ticket. Right before he was set to fly out, Kaczynski agreed to plead guilty. It was over.
***
“It was a good day in law enforcement,” Burns says 10 years later. “It was the Super Bowl of law enforcement.”
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Photo by Lindsay Gjerde |
| Burns and his wife, Laura, still live in Lincoln with their 11-year-old daughter. |
He’s retired after 34 years with the Forest Service, now living in Lincoln in his brown house with the leaning tree in the front. He has peaceful days, sometimes planning his family’s next visit to Helena or a downhill ski trip to Discovery ski area if the weather holds. He cross country skis every winter day.
Burns’ father, who died in 2004 at 87, had a sense of humor about the Unabomber. He joked that the FBI took away the only Ph.D. in Lincoln.
Burns’ handcuffs, the ones originally placed on Kaczynski, he gave to the lead postal inspector on the Unabomber case. A tactical trainer had taught Burns wrist and compliance locks to handcuff suspects. Excited when he learned Burns cuffed Kaczynski, the trainer eagerly asked what hold he used.
I used the greasy grab hand lock, Burns replied wryly, referring to Kaczynski’s filthy state.
Kaczynski’s old mailbox at the end of the road, where FBI agents originally hoped they’d capture him, was taken away after the arrest because it kept getting stolen. A chain-link fence with barbed wire cordons off the site where the cabin stood. The cabin was hauled away soon after the arrest. All that’s left are remnants. A spot where Kaczynski kept his garden. Sticks holding up a new sapling. Untread snow where no one walks – or hunts – anymore.
The 7-Up Ranch burned down, and the Canyon Resources’ mining deal that gave Burns and the FBI the perfect cover for Kaczynski’s capture fell through.
With Laura and his daughter Ellen, now 11, Burns relaxes in his newly remodeled home. Antler trophies hang on the wall, and by the door is a wood stove he taught Ellen how to work.
They took in a cat named Rodney, who lost a tail and leg from a car accident. Burns calls Rodney the most expensive cat in Lincoln because of all the surgery.
“Could’ve gotten a horse,” he says, watching the cat hop around on its three feet. Laura likes to call Rodney a “cabbit.”
He’s had other memorable adventures as a Forest Service law enforcement agent. Burns also patrolled the Mexican border for illegal aliens in the 1980s and the Canadian border for drugs soon after the Unabomber capture. In 2002, he helped with security at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. When he retired, the Forest Service was starting to crack down on methamphetamine labs popping up in the national forests.
Burns’ eyes light up when he talks about the land he once guarded. He can name every mountain range, lookout or pass around Lincoln. Fueling him for those intense two months were his knowledge and passion for his home.
“I got a personal satisfaction of enforcing protection of our resources,” Burns says.
People still talk about the Unabomber capture, but not often, Burns says. Sometimes, he’ll take out his Unabomber box for neighbors or the curious. It has a whole bunch of stuff: the Bozeman Chronicle article about him, a photo album of the FBI agents and the cabin, the FBI profile of Kaczynski, copies of all the diaries, some maps. Most of it was for the trial that never happened. He doesn’t really keep it in any order. It was only one part of his life.
But every year on April 3, Jerry and Tom talk by phone to wish each other a happy anniversary of the Unabomber’s capture.
