Photo by Tom Bauer, Missouilan

Media representatives gather on Stemple Pass Road three days after Ted Kaczynski's arrest. A pool of reporters selected to see the cabin briefed other media on what they had seen. This photo was taken on Saturday, April 6, 1996.

Media Frenzy
Lincoln residents riled by reporter mob

By Jacob Livingston

Once the news broke in early April 1996 that Theodore Kaczynski – better known as the Unabomber – had been apprehended at a decrepit cabin near Lincoln, Mont., media outlets from around the world and U.S. government agents descended upon the small mountain town. Lincoln – a quiet timber town with a population of 1,100 people – quickly turned into a media circus and focal point of the nation.

The view from inside Garland’s Town and Country Store out onto Highway 200, which cuts through the center of town, was unusual in the days, weeks and even months following the arrest as a volley of visitors moved in on the town’s main street. The picturesque view from just about anywhere in Lincoln — of the surrounding mountains and of pine trees peppered throughout the community, rising much higher than the town’s buildings — was now obstructed by TV vans and TV crews. Government and media vehicles lined the streets. Restaurants, shops and motels served record numbers of customers.

“It brought us out of the dumps,” said Linda Bordeleau, who worked at the now-closed 7-Up Club restaurant in 1996. It had been a fairly cold winter and it was still cold, with temperatures hovering around 20 degrees and several inches of snow blanketing the ground, said Teresa Brown, an employee at Garland’s since 1993. The newcomers hadn’t anticipated what Montana’s early spring weather would bring, so Garland’s sold out nearly all of its winter supplies to the unwary travelers.

“I think that was probably the best April we’ve ever had,” Brown said.

The unsuspecting folks of the tiny town were hounded by reporters hunting for any scraps of information to weave into a story, said Teresa Garland, owner of Garland’s. Reporters often grabbed anyone off the streets of Lincoln who said they had had some sort of connection with Kaczynski, Garland said, but he, in fact, had only talked to a few people in town at any length.

That didn’t stop the townsfolk from talking and the reporters from listening. “There were a lot of anybodys and everybodys with a story to tell,” Garland said.
Many of the stories in the papers weren’t true, Brown said, such as the claim by some local residents that they had hung out with Kaczynski in a local bar. Kaczynski would never have done anything like that, she said.

As the owner and a server at Garland’s, Teresa Garland was one of the few people in town Kaczynski ever talked with. And, even then, it was usually on his terms. “We could talk about gardening, and that was all,” she said. “It was nothing deep and personal. He didn’t seem like a sour person, just a quiet person.”

For Garland, the media blitz began as she was on her way to a family member’s wedding in rural Utah on the day after Kaczynski’s arrest. She was located by Salt Lake City-based reporters, who had already set up a makeshift studio in her father’s out-of-the-way Utah home before she had even arrived.

“For the next four days, the phone just kept ringing off the wall at my dad’s place,” Garland said.

Photo by Mary Hayes

J. J. Johnson was a high school student in Lincoln when Ted Kaczynski was arrested in 1996. The small town swarmed with media and spectators, Johnson recalled: "You could tell who wasn't from here. We don't drive the expensive cars and walk around with earpieces in."

Every one of Lincoln’s estimated 55 hotel rooms was booked, recalled J. J. Johnson, a freshman at Lincoln High School at the time and now director of Hi-Country Snack Foods Inc.’s Trading Post and Museum. Johnson was watching the news coverage of the event  from the school’s history classroom, the only one with a TV, he said, while the journalists were busy downtown, interrogating any person willing to talk.

“[They’d] just pull ‘em off the street and put a microphone in their face,” Johnson said. “Everybody was in for those, for the 15 minutes of fame.”

Myrna Wells, a server in 1996 at the now-defunct restaurant Burt’s, recalled getting some stories sent to her from her sister in California. A good number of the national stories, Wells said, portrayed the residents of Lincoln as backwoods mountain folk much like Kaczynski.

“We didn’t like having our little town in the news because they would never tell the truth,” said Wells, now an employee at Hi-Country. The media staked out the post office in the hopes of trapping Lincoln residents, Wells said, so she waited until late at night to make the trip.

No one in town expected the news of the Unabomber’s arrest, Bordeleau said, adding that it wasn’t unusual to have mountain folk living in the outskirts of the town.

 “[Kaczynski] was just town color,” she said. “This town is full of it.”As the well of stories dried up, the flood of reporters receded and the talk-show circuits went on to other topics, the citizens of Lincoln were left to figure out what events in their town meant.

“I find it really amazing that it happened right under our noses,” Garland said. “It’s just something that happens in your life that you can’t change, and you might as well accept.”