In the fall of 1997, Whitewood Transportation in Billings received a call from some people in California about moving something — a structure — from Montana to California.

The trucking company knew this structure was special when the employees realized the phone call was from the federal public defenders of Theodore John Kaczynski. They wanted his cabin as evidence in Kaczynski’s California trial.

“We figured out after a few calls that it was the Unabomber’s cabin,” said Mike Wilson, president of Whitewood Transportation.

Built by a murderous recluse, transported more than 1,000 miles as evidence and now owned as a memento by the FBI, the cabin has had an adventurous life.
 
The Unatrucker
Kaczynski’s defense team hired Whitewood to truck the cabin from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside of Great Falls, Mont., where a local sheriff’s pickup had dropped it off, to the former Mather Air Force Base, near Sacramento, Calif.

Bill Sprout, 50, of Ennis, was assigned to drive the “lowboy” trailer with the 10-by-12-foot cabin strapped on sideways. The lowboy, only a foot off the ground, instead of the standard 5 feet, was used in order to stay within trucking regulations.

Photo by Cris Crewell, Sacramento Bee

Bill Sprout, of Ennis, Mont., drives the Unabomber's cabin with a California Highway Patrol escort through Emigrant Gap on Interstate 80 in early December 1997.

“It was just another day on the job for me,” Sprout said.  “Everybody made a bigger deal out of it than I would have.”

When he wasn’t talking on his cell phone to reporters, Sprout listened to country music as he drove the Unabomber’s cabin to California in the cold and snow of December.

The cabin’s notoriety made driving the wide load difficult. Photographers, news cameras and bystanders lined the shoulder of the highway on overpasses and near towns for the three-day journey.

“CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN were following me with cameras for the entire trip,” Sprout said.

For a trucker, it was an unusual obstacle.

“The photographers became a hazard because (Sprout) was over width,” said Wilson. “We had to request people to stay off the road.”

The cabin even made “The Tonight Show” with some footage of Sprout driving the cabin down the road to the tune of the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme song, he said.

When his kids saw him on TV, they gave Sprout his nickname: the “Unatrucker.” The name stuck – he now has a license plate reading “UNATRKER.”

Federal marshals accompanied Sprout for the trip, and at night he slept in the truck, as he normally does. But he and his truck and the cabin were locked inside a fenced area at the sheriff’s department when he stopped for the night in Pocatello, Idaho, and then in Lovelock, Nev.

The second night of the trip, the NBC crew took Sprout out for a steak at a Lovelock casino.

“I got treated like royalty,” Sprout said. “I didn’t have to stop at weigh stations and nobody passed me.”

When he got to Sacramento the media was in a frenzy, with helicopters flying overhead and cameras crowding the entrance to the base.
 
An Unusual Day at Work
When Paul Bernheisel, an Environmental Protection Agency employee, heard that Kaczynski’s cabin would be stored near his office at the Mather Air Field, he decided to take advantage of the situation.

Photo by Cris Crewell, Sacramento Bee

The cabin is forklifted into a warehouse space at Mather Field on Dec. 5, 1997 friday 12/5/97 after a long trek on Ennis' truck.

He got his picture taken in front of it.

He took a few minutes off his job doing environmental remediation at the former base to watch a crew unload the cabin into a storage shed. Bernheisel remembers that there was some trouble getting the cabin into the building. It took them a while to squeeze it through the door.

He also thought the cabin was pretty well built. “They could pick the whole thing up like a dollhouse,” Bernheisel said.

He and some of his office buddies took turns standing and clicking, standing and clicking.
 
Proof of Madness
Kaczynski’s lawyers, trying to save him from the death penalty, hoped to use physical evidence of his lifestyle to prove his insanity.

Psychiatrists they hired found Kaczynski schizophrenic and paranoid, according to court documents.

The proof that Kaczynski’s defense team had was his cabin.

“When you see it, it’s a good way to understand the mental state he was in,” said Quin Denvir,  part of  his defense team.

Kaczynski had lived in the small cabin that he built near Lincoln for about 20 years with no running water or electricity.

Inside the cabin, investigators found bomb-making materials, the typewriter he used to write his Manifesto, notebooks of meticulous writing about pipe bombs and 232 books – including some on Eastern mysticism and a guide to the Bible.

“It was just a one-room small cabin with a pot-belly stove and some very small windows,” said Denvir. “It was just wood and a roof.”

Kaczynski’s defense team kept the cabin at Mather Air Field with SafeStore Inc., even after his confession in 1998, because of the chance of a retrial.

But the cabin was collecting storage fees, so eventually the team handed the cabin over to the government.
 
A Memento
The FBI took possession of the cabin and credited its estimated retail value to the $15 million that Kaczynski owed as restitution to his victims.

The cabin is currently in the possession of the government and is being stored in the Sacramento area, William Carter of the FBI’s national press office said in an e-mail.
Carter said there has been recent talk about putting the cabin on the FBI tour at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington. The tour has traditionally included the history of the FBI and a viewing of a forensic lab with a firearms demonstration at the end.

“One idea is to show examples of some big cases,” Carter said. “The question is whether or not (the cabin) could be released to the public.”

The cabin may also be included in a pending civil suit involving Kaczynski’s possessions.

In July of 2005 Kaczynski requested the return of his property that had been seized by the government as part of its investigation.

 Among the property he wanted returned were some writings he wished to donate to the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection of radical literature.

But the courts did not want Kaczynski to benefit at all from the sale or transfer of the property.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that all of Kaczynski’s property be sold in order to pay the $15 million owed to victims and their families.

The victims are currently deciding how to maximize the profits of the property.
The cabin is not included in the court documents of the case, but if the victims or their families asked that it be added, the FBI would not hesitate to hand it over, according to Carter.