AP photo by John Youngbear

Theodore John Kaczynski, suspected Unabomber, enters the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont., on April 4, 1996. On the right is former FBI agent Tom McDaniel, who helped arrest him.

By Meghan Piercy

The Early Years
Lawmen called him the Junkyard Bomber in the late 1970s because his bombs seemed fashioned out of found and homemade objects, things a person walking down a Sacramento street might step on, or a guy pedaling his bicycle over a Rocky Mountain pass might find. Screws, nails, and split-shot fishing weights that he would glue to his bombs for shrapnel.

In time they would learn what smart things the bomber did to evade them. He didn’t buy many parts for his bombs. When he did, he removed any fingerprints that might be on them — his or anyone else’s. He rubbed sandpaper over the pipes he bought at Burton Lumber in Salt Lake City, at Rock Hand Hardware in Helena, and at Kramis Hardware Store in Missoula.

He was smart enough to remove the oily fingerprints of postal workers from his stamps, applying a cocktail of saltwater and soybean oil to them. He knew that all postal workers roll their fingers across inkpads when they are hired, and those prints are in a database and if the FBI found any prints on his stamps they could trace them to the station where he bought them. If they did that, someone there might remember him.

The mystery bomber bought his stamps in rolls and only from machines because he knew that when postal workers feed the stamp machines, they only touch the outer stamps of a roll — stamps that he would remove and never dare affix to his packages. Over the course of his nearly 18-year reign of terror, he repeatedly applied the $1 Eugene O’Neill stamp to his packages. Maybe he used them because he liked the playwright, or because they were old and sometimes fingerprints wear with time. Eugene O’Neill stamps were issued in 1967 — 11 years before his first bomb.

He knew all these things about fingerprints because, tucked away in his tiny cabin near Lincoln, Mont., he had their book. It was titled “The Science of Fingerprints – Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice.”

AP photo by Elaine Thompson

Ted Kaczynski's one-room cabin in Lincoln, Mont., photographed April 6, 1996, three days after his arrest.

There were other reasons the bomber was hard to catch.

Long before the FBI captured Theodore J. Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, at his shack near the Continental Divide, there were too many law enforcement agencies involved in the case. They weren’t cohesive, and they rarely shared their files.

Kaczynski’s bombs crossed a number of jurisdictions and so, in addition to state and local agencies, three federal investigative agencies were involved. The FBI was involved because bombs found on aircraft and on university campuses are its exclusive jurisdiction. Bombs shipped via U.S. mail are the jurisdiction of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and bombs placed in public places, such as parking lots, are the jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Kaczynski’s bombs spanned the gamut.

In all, he mailed and planted 16 bombs as one of the most successful booby-trap bombers in the history of the United States. His contraptions injured 23 people (maiming 11) and killed three.

Another snag in catching him was that his hunters lagged behind their prey. When he took a hiatus, the law turned its attention to other crimes and criminals. Investigators were removed from the case. And when he deployed another bomb, the law responded by assigning a fresh batch of agents who needed time to study the case.

The bomber himself grew frustrated that the law was slow to acknowledge  him. In 1980, he knew they hadn’t recognized that the first three bombs were from the same source. Beginning with bomb No. 4, he started placing small, hand-cut metal tags inside each device. On the tags he punched little holes with a hammer and a nail, holes that formed the letters “FC.” In his later bombs, he stopped using the tags and took to punching the letters “FC” into hunks of rebar fitted neatly and pinned into each end of the pipes. The FBI now believes that “FC” stood for a 1950s libertarian group based in Chicago called The Freedom Club.

After Kaczynski’s bomb No. 7 exploded in the engineering building at Berkeley, injuring professor Diogenes J. Angelakos, the case of the Junkyard Bomber graduated to a major FBI case and, from then on, all documents pertaining to it were headed with the words, “UNABOM Major Case #75,” named after his early targets of universities and airlines.
 
The Middle Years
The Unabomber’s first contraption exploded in 1978.  Still, by 1987, there was little cohesion among the investigative agencies.

But there was a witness.

On Feb. 20, 1987, as a man crouched in the parking lot of CAAM’s Inc., in Salt Lake City, Tammy Fluehe sat at her desk and watched. He was arming his device — a bomb inside a couple of two-by-fours spiked with a small army of nails — just five feet on the other side of her window. As Fluehe called for her co-worker to come see, the Unabomber heard her through the glass. He looked right at her. She looked right back. He walked away nonchalantly. Later a co-worker drove into the parking lot and started to pick up the hunk of wood. It exploded in his hands, but he survived.

At that moment, Fluehe became the only known person to actually have seen the Unabomber. 

Ultimately, several sketches were drawn trying to fit Fluehe’s description. She wasn’t satisfied until forensic artist Jeanne Boylan drew the final sketch. But good cops know that serious criminals often commit their crimes in disguise. The FBI would find out after his capture, based upon evidence found in Kaczynski’s cabin, that he used to pack his nose with cotton. He stuck chewing gum beneath his upper lip. He waxed his cheeks and nose, and he wore sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt. And the reason the FBI decided to publish the composite sketch in black and white was that sometimes criminals wear wigs. That day in Utah, the day Fluehe saw him, Kaczynski wore a blonde wig.

Photo by Meghan Piercy

Max Noel, a retired FBI agent, makes his home in the San Francisco Bay area. He served in the FBI for 31 years and was a member of the Unabom Task Force. Noel also worked on the Patti Hearst case.

The Later Years
After he was spotted in Salt Lake City, the Unabomber disappeared for a while. Some thought he had been scared into hiding. Others hoped he had blown himself up or died of natural causes. But six years and four months after Fluehe spotted the Unabomber, he returned to the stage of American terrorism, and he returned with a vengeance.

He had used that long break to improve his weapons.

He began to use explosive materials far more complex and lethal than the match-heads and smokeless powders he had been using. In June 1993, his upgraded work exploded on both sides of the continent. Bomb No. 13 exploded in Tiburon, Calif., on June 22. Bomb No. 14 blew up at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on June 24. People were injured, but not killed.

Also on June 24, Warren Hogue, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, received a letter from “an anarchist group” calling itself “FC.” The intent of the letter was to establish contact with the Times and provide a unique number that would be used in future communications to authenticate letters from “FC.”

The letter was typed on an L.C. Smith-Corona, circa 1925-1930, with 2.54 spacing and pica style type — meaning it took 10 characters to equal a linear inch. Every letter “FC” wrote thereafter, and every label that wasn’t handwritten before it, rolled through the spindle of that typewriter. Only one Unabomber document had been typed on a different typewriter — a letter to United Airlines President Percy Wood, in 1980, as a precursor to bomb No. 4.

As the Unabomber upped the ante, so did the feds.
 
July 1993
On July 20, 1993, President Clinton fired FBI Director William Sessions and appointed U.S. District Court Judge Louis J. Freeh to replace him. Also that month, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno created the UNABOM Task Force — a unified group comprising agents from the ATF and the Postal Inspection Service and headed by the FBI. And so, while Kaczynski hunted snowshoe hares and technocrats, the UTF, headquartered on the 12th floor in the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco, hunted Kaczynski.

The first thing the UTF did was call for all files. Fifteen years of accumulated documents were in those files by the time the UTF inherited the case. Computerizing them took an entire year.

“This case itself was an info-management nightmare because we had too much information,” says retired FBI agent Max Noel, one of the original agents assigned to the UTF. By the end, there would be 11 million pages of documents in more than 59,266 files. There were 7,403,390 records of individual people. Every professor and student and employee of every university associated with a UNABOM event was entered into a mainframe computer. Every employee of every business associated with a UNABOM event was entered into the mainframe computer.  Every driver’s license in every state associated with a UNABOM event was entered into that computer.

Then the UTF re-examined every bombing since the beginning. Each member was assigned a different group of bombings for complete examination. They re-submitted the evidence to the FBI lab because of new technologies, such as DNA testing. They visited the sites of every bomb. They interviewed every living victim by first sending each one a 63-page questionnaire, then by meeting with each, in person, for three days of interviews in San Francisco. The computer tried to find a link between the victims. It found none.

An original Unabom Task Force poster.

October 1993
FBI Director Freeh announced an unprecedented $1 million reward for information leading to the identification and conviction of the Unabomber. The Unabomber’s targets — universities, airlines, medical groups and individuals he had attacked — donated the reward money.

The UTF went to People Magazine, GQ, Police Chief, American Journal, The Washington Post and Playboy asking for help in spreading the word about the toll-free number and reward. They also went to television shows such as “America’s Most Wanted.”

The toll-free number was overwhelmed with calls — more than 55,000 in the two and a half years it would take to catch the Unabomber. Every single one of those calls had to be documented and given an identifying number so it could be verified if it came time to cash in the big reward. And every single one of them had to be investigated.

The UTF also posted a Web site at a time when the Internet was just getting its legs.

In all, there were 2,417 suspects in the case, and every time a bomb exploded the whereabouts of each had to be determined. UTF members neglected their families as they worked 18-hour days, seven days a week.

The Unabomber continued to mail his bombs from post offices right under their noses. His packaged booby traps and letters were postmarked from Sacramento, Oakland and San Francisco. Try as the UTF might, the bombs kept slipping past them. One, members of the UTF believe, was mailed within a block of their office.

1994-1995
The Unabomber had already killed one man — computer store owner Hugh Scrutton of Sacramento, Calif., in 1985 — and now he killed two more. Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive, died from a Kaczynski bomb in 1994. Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, was killed in 1995.

But the case was about to break. The Unabomber felt a hankering to be heard. In April 1995 he mailed a small mound of letters: a second letter to Warren Hogue at the New York Times, another to David Gelernter of Yale University — the victim of his 14th bomb. He sent letters, one each, to Richard Roberts and Phillip Sharp, who shared a 1993 Nobel Prize for their discovery of split genes. The letters threatened that if they didn’t stop their work they would fall prey to his explosives. All these letters bore Oakland, Calif., postmarks.

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