Photo by Sarah Welliver

Maureen Fisher, former owner of the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, holds a copy of her paper and the Unabomber's Manifesto, which she printed in its entirety. Fisher and her husband Rollie witnessed the Unabomber's arrest and the national media frenzy, but printed no stories about the Unabomber in their own paper.

Small town, BIG press
Lincoln's local paper recalls the coming of the big boys

By  Alex Strickland

Ten years ago the biggest story that Lincoln, Mont., had ever seen came out of the woods in the form of a wild-eyed murderer named Ted Kaczynski. But if you read only the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, Lincoln’s local paper, you wouldn’t have known it.

The Dispatch, then a twice-monthly publication, printed the Unabomber’s Manifesto in its entirety, but never a word about Kaczynski’s arrest, trial or admission of guilt. The story was being told elsewhere.

Hello, this is Lisa from CBS Newscast New York. Can you confirm that the Unabomber has been arrested in Lincoln?

It was not what Rollie Fisher expected to hear on the line when he and his wife, Maureen, ran into their house around noon on April 3, 1996. They had gotten a tip at lunch that day that something was happening at the 7-Up Ranch. They rushed home to get their cameras when the phone rang. And rang.

“ABC, NBC, BBC,” Rollie said. “They just kept going.”

By the time he and Maureen, the editor, photographer, writer and publisher of the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, could shake themselves loose from the phone and head to the 7-Up, it was about 2:30 p.m.

The scene that greeted them was chaos. The house at the 7-Up resembled a “ghost house,” said Rollie. The windows were covered with white sheets. A huge antenna stood on the roof. Agents in navy blue FBI hats buzzed in and out. The lot was filled with what Rollie estimated were about 50 rental 4x4s, and a motor home served as a mobile headquarters.

“I knew full well it was a command post for something,” Rollie said.

The first journalists on the scene, the Fishers tried to sort heads from tails as members of the press corps began to arrive. First from Missoula and Helena, then from what seemed like everywhere.

The Fishers, and everyone else, got word that whatever was happening was outside of town on Stemple Pass Road. “We knew zip,” Rollie said, but he and Maureen hopped in their car and made for the mountains.

As the Fishers approached the property adjacent to Kaczynski’s cabin, the road straightened out and the sight was shocking.

“There were FBI guys everywhere,” Rollie said. Agents parked their vehicles on the narrow road. Within an hour and a half, hundreds of media people and seven television uplink trucks had made it up the mountain road, clogging the way even more.

Soon, a white Ford Bronco descended the hill and, as the Fishers would later learn, stopped at the 7-Up before heading for Helena.

And just like that the Unabomber was caught.

In the ensuing media storm, one voice was noticeably absent from the fray, the one closest of all: The Blackfoot Valley Dispatch.

“There was nothing for me to write about,” Maureen said. “Everybody had written about it. It wasn’t even mentioned in my paper.”

The Fishers, however, found themselves and their town mentioned in many other papers.

That night a knock on the door at 3 a.m. woke the Fishers. Rollie awoke to find a reporter, cameraman and producer from “American Journal” on the front stoop.

“They interviewed us right here in our house.”

While Rollie and Maureen were chasing the action, their adult son Todd and his wife manned the phone at the Fisher house. Rollie estimated that he,  his wife and son had been heard on about 75 radio shows live around the country in the days following Kaczynski’s arrest.

The next day the Fishers drove into Lincoln and witnessed what Rollie said was “the funniest thing I have seen in my life.”

Lincoln’s remoteness prevented reporters’ cell phones from working and they were lined up 20 deep at each of Lincoln’s five pay phones.

“And of the 20, 19 were just livid,” Rollie said.

Before she ran the paper, Maureen said, the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch had a contest awarding $5 to whoever found the most mistakes in one of the papers. Kaczynski won whenever he played.

She printed the Manifesto in its entirety as a courtesy. It did not run in the paper, but she used her resources to print 25 or 50 copies. She ate the cost of the publication, though she admits it “made me feel stupid.”

 Kaczynski was, she figured, either highly intelligent or stupid. Or both.