By Katrin Madayag

Wednesday, April 3, 1996
Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up. The litany runs through his head.

U.S. Forest Service officer Jerry Burns can also hear his wife’s voice reminding him that their daughter’s first birthday is tomorrow. They’ve been planning Ellen’s party for a while.

It’s cold. Not surprising for early April in Montana. Good thing Burns tugged on wool pants this morning, preparing for the freeze on his walk up to Ted Kaczynski’s cabin just outside Lincoln.

Burns, along with FBI agents Max Noel and Tom McDaniel, has permission to go through a neighbor’s property. Burns can see Kaczynski’s 10-by-12-foot cabin off the road. A creek and the Helena National Forest up the mountain block escape to the east. If only he could hear something inside.

As the men approach the cabin, Burns hopes the FBI SWAT team is in place.

Ted… Ted, are you home?

Tunnel vision takes over.

Get this done.

Noel and McDaniel busy themselves posing as mining company surveyors and pointing here and there for property lines. Noel holds tax records and maps of the area.

Ted! You in there? Burns calls again. Their boots crunch on the frozen leaves and ground of the forest.

While his orange survey vest shields his intentions, it won’t shield bullets or shards of a bomb if Ted does turn out to be the Unabomber.

Suddenly, Burns and the others hear scampering as they near the cabin.

Someone’s home.

The door opens. Ted pops his head out. Disheveled and unkempt, he glares menacingly at them.

Here we go, Burns thinks.

***

Burns had found a career with the Forest Service as a law enforcement agent.  Born in Great Falls and raised in Lincoln, he is a hometown boy whose love of the land always brings him back to Montana. Laura, his wife, also works for the Forest Service. They were married on March 4, 1989, a date etched on a commemorative plate so Jerry won’t forget, Laura likes to say.

Photo by Lindsay Gjerde

Burns holds an autographed 1996 issue of Newsweek with Ted Kaczynski on the cover. Burns' knowledge of the area helped FBI agents apprehend the Unabomber without bloodshed.

Burns likes people and people like Burns, especially in Lincoln. As a boy who left and came back, Burns naturally wore what men in town wore – hiking boots, wool pants, thick cotton shirts and a mustache.

Burns has learned that friends can lead to many places. Friends like Tom McDaniel, the regional FBI agent stationed in Helena, who called Burns one night in February 1996. They had started out as colleagues on the Holter Lake case in 1987 when two escaped California convicts fresh from a murder in Colorado fled to the lake and blew up a summer trailer home. It got good media attention, and the two native Montanans who worked well together became friends.

Yeah, Jerry knew Tom.

On that cold February night, McDaniel called Burns, asking him to come to Helena – but you can’t tell anyone, he said. 

Figuring the call had to do with the Freemen, a Montana political group giving the FBI some trouble, Burns slept without a hint of what was to consume him for the next two months.

When he got to Helena the next morning, Burns entered a room with four people he didn’t know, but would, soon enough. 

We have permission to brief you on a sensitive issue, said FBI agent Max Noel.

Noel was the case agent supervisor of the FBI task force from San Francisco chasing the Unabomber, whose homemade bombs had killed three people and injured 23 others. Beside him were FBI agents Candace DeLong and Dave Weber. 

Do you know Ted Kaczynski?

I don’t really know him, Burns replied. He’d been to Kaczynski’s cabin. Lincoln’s a small town. Burns’ mother, a nurse, even stitched Kaczynski up once at their house. But Kaczynski never made eye contact with people in town, so people left him alone.

Do you know if he’s home or not?

I could find out, said Burns.

All it took was a call to Butch Gehring, who owned the land adjacent to Kaczynski’s. Gehring’s dad had sold land to Kaczynski and his brother, David. Burns and Gehring went back a ways. Before Lincoln had a high school, both attended high school in Augusta. Lincoln kids bonded like that.

I haven’t seen him, Gehring said, but he’s there. He could hear Kaczynski chopping wood.

Can we go on up? Burns asked.

OK, said Butch. But no dogs. Kaczynski doesn’t like dogs.

The next day, Burns snowmobiled to a spot near the cabin with Weber and McDaniel.

Approaching the cabin cautiously on snowshoes, they got close enough to see smoke coming out of the chimney and hear someone chopping wood. After his arrest, Kaczynski would tell the FBI he knew they’d been there because he had seen their snowshoe tracks.

***

Things fell into place after that.

Most of the FBI agents stayed in Helena during the two-month investigation. In Lincoln, an FBI “husband-and-wife” team, John Gray and DeLong, rented a room at the Sportsman Motel, posing as journalists doing human interest stories on Canyon Resources Corp.’s plan to mine up by Kaczynski’s land. They also watched his bus activity. As reporters, they got to ask questions without being questioned themselves.

Montana could be a tricky kind of rural jungle for out-of-towners. One time, Burns guided the FBI’s radio team to a lookout to put up some equipment. On a trail that usually took half an hour, they spent three hours snowmobiling up – mostly because nobody on the team knew how to snowmobile and they carried a lot of equipment. Once there, the frustrated team couldn’t get the receiver and transmitter to work.

It was 20 below zero. Snow and wind pummeled them.

Why don’t you just use the Forest Service’s equipment already in place, Burns suggested.

The team hooked it up, and it worked.

On the way down, one technician fell off his snowmobile. It zoomed right off the trail and disappeared. Later, after the Forest Service retrieved the errant snowmobile, the grateful radio team gave Burns a bottle of whiskey.

***

Kaczynski was already the top suspect. Finally, the break came. The FBI had hotel records of his stays in Helena that coincided with the mailed bombs – just the circumstantial evidence needed for a search warrant. The manhunt for the Unabomber, who had terrorized the country and frustrated law enforcement for almost 18 years, had come to its climax in Lincoln.

The agents and Burns wanted to arrest Kaczynski while he rode his bike into town. The FBI profiled Kaczynski as suicidal, with access to firearms and explosives in his cabin. Best to get him while he’s out, they decided. Trying to get him at the cabin was the worst-case scenario.

So Burns and the FBI waited two months for Kaczynski to come down the mountain road, either to get his mail or come to town for supplies. 

In all this time, Kaczynski never left his cabin.

But the FBI still needed to make sure Kaczynski was up there, which meant another trip for Burns. It was time to let Gehring in on the action. Burns called him. I have a friend in mining who’s interested in some lumber, he told Gehring. Can we come up and talk?

Gehring agreed. Arriving with Noel, Burns admitted that he had lied. This wasn’t about lumber. Instead, Burns told a partial truth. The FBI suspected Kaczynski of sending threatening letters in the mail. After introducing Noel, he asked if they could walk to the cabin.

Yeah, Gehring said.

The three men hiked up, and Gehring brought along his dogs. Nearing the cabin, Gehring had to yell at the yelping dogs to stop chasing deer.

Suddenly, Burns saw the cabin door jerk open. Wearing a red stocking hat, Kaczynski abruptly stuck his head out and glared at them, then at the dogs. He slammed the door in anger.

But Burns was happy. Kaczynski was home.

He drew the cabin as best he could from memory for the search warrant. Later, Kaczynski would see the sketch and mention that Burns had put the window in the wrong spot.

Burns held strategy meetings for the capture at his house. During these sessions, Laura tried to stay out of the way, but their small house made hiding secrets difficult. For Burns, the extreme pressure could be relieved only through talking to Laura.

Burns also couldn’t say much to the Forest Service. With Noel’s approval, Burns spoke briefly with Tom King, his boss, on his involvement with the FBI. When he started to elaborate, King cut him off. I don’t want to know anything about it, King said.

Although townspeople would later claim they knew about it, Burns believed the investigation was still undercover. The agents stayed in Helena, but they posed as visiting geologists in Lincoln. Laura told her husband that girls in town fluttered with excitement at so many handsome men in L.L. Bean clothes.

***

Tuesday, April 2, 1996
McDaniel called Burns at home. It’s going down in the morning, he said.

What happened? Burns asked, stunned.

A national news network knew that the FBI was in western Montana, somewhere between Missoula and Helena, and on the Unabomber trail. They had 24 hours until the story broke.

Mobilization started immediately. Law enforcement descended on Montana throughout the night, grabbing whatever flight they could get – to Missoula, Helena, Billings.

They converged at the 7-Up Ranch about seven miles outside of Lincoln. Burns knew the owners, who let the FBI stage its operation there.

Wednesday, April 3, 1996
At about 5 a.m., Burns arrived at the 7-Up. It was chilly, with brisk winds slicing the air. Crunchy ice covered the road. He hadn’t slept much the night before. He didn’t usually eat breakfast, and that morning was no exception. But he drank coffee at the ranch to calm his nerves.

Burns and McDaniel briefed the SWAT team from San Francisco, which had its own ideas on how to capture Kaczynski. The FBI’s reputation had suffered after the Ruby Ridge and Waco fiascoes, and the public disliked the bureau’s gung-ho attitude against recluses. The FBI needed to take Kaczynski down, not kill him.

The SWAT team, decked out in snowsuits, proposed a “knock and announce” entry. They’d sneak up to the cabin and pound on the door.  BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! FBI! 

Burns listened in disbelief. No. That wasn’t going to work. 

While the “knock and announce” might work in California, this was Montana, he and McDaniel said. Even in April, there’s snow on the ground, and sneaking up on a mountain man isn’t easy in the forest.

No, that wasn’t going to work.

Burns came up with the new plan. They’d approach the cabin as mining company surveyors, and the SWAT team would surround the cabin up in the woods of the national forest as backup.

Canyon Resources had been investigating the possibility of gold mining near Lincoln, and Kaczynski knew its surveyors were checking property lines frequently.

Burns needed official Forest Service surveying vests, and he headed to the Forest Service office.  Laura was there. She got him the orange and canvas-colored vests. He also grabbed some pens, ribbons and a clipboard. 

Laura was nervous. Just don’t get blown up, she said. You have to make it to your daughter’s birthday.

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