Driving Mr. Kaczynski

By Alex Loeb
 
John Skeldon didn’t think anything unusual at all when giving Ted a ride. Skeldon and his dad had been driving the mail truck for years from their hometown of Lincoln clear to Helena and back. They earned a few extra dollars giving rides, and Ted was their neighbor and frequent passenger.

Skeldon thought of him as a good neighbor. He lived up the road almost a mile, but in these parts that makes for a kind of kinship. No, Skeldon didn’t think it was unusual giving Ted a ride, but later he would. Ted would use the postal service a lot in the years he holed up in a cabin, for rides down to Helena, for mailing packages all over the country and for killing people.

It’s been 10 years since Ted Kaczynski was arrested as the Unabomber, 10 years since Skeldon’s neighbor and passenger left Lincoln for good. Even after learning Ted was a killer, Skeldon still doesn’t think much about him. For a brief time before and after his arrest, the people who drove the Unabomber from city to city were asked by the media and FBI to look back and piece it all together. Ten years later, Skeldon remembers those pieces of time with the same distance that was always between him and Ted. He remembers only Ted, not Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber.

He stretches his memory back, eyes downcast, seldom sharing chuckles with regulars across the counter of the Bootlegger in Lincoln where he tends bar near a prominent elk head and red beer signs.

“If he were to come into this bar right now nobody would look up,” says Skeldon, a quiet man with an old red baseball cap curled over his eyes. “It takes a lot to shake this town.”

Life goes on for Skeldon much the same as it did 10 years earlier. He still lives in Lincoln, he still waves to his neighbors, and he still drives the mail truck, although he can’t take passengers anymore.

He remembers Ted in the mail truck with his dad driving. He remembers Ted always well put together, clean-shaven and polite. He remembers how hard it was to keep a conversation going on the long drive. Mostly, though, it has been easy for him not to think much about Ted at all. 

As a kid he would ride his bike past Ted on his own bike. Skeldon and his sisters would wave politely. Ted would wave and pedal past Skeldon’s house down into town. He can’t remember a single time Ted ever came into town for a beer at the Bootlegger Bar. “I have nothing against him,” he says. “If I saw him now I’d probably just say hi.”

Kaczynski hasn’t left much of an imprint on the town of Lincoln, and that’s the way most people there like it. It’s a town where people’s business is their own, where people can do what they like tucked away in their homes and cabins. With all the hours spent sitting and chatting next to a killer, Skeldon never had reason to suspect or to ask just what Ted was doing holed up in his cabin.

But it was through the mail that Kaczynski has left one last memory for Skeldon — a series of letters mailed from prison to Skeldon’s mother. Skeldon doesn’t care to read through the inch-thick pile of papers, but he’s proud of the collection. He plans to sell them sooner or later.

Like John Skeldon, Mark Campbell of Great Falls hasn’t thought of the Unabomber in a long while. When the FBI interviewed him in March 1996, Campbell had been driving the Missoula-Lincoln-Great Falls bus route since 1987 for Intermountain Bus Lines and later for Rimrock Trailways. He remembers his part with amusement, a good story told with chuckles. He collected a shoebox full of newspaper clippings and pieces of memorabilia from the arrest and media madness to follow. They help him remember. He is going to show his grandkids someday. He’ll show them the picture from the New York Times of his bus, the same bus that Ted Kaczynski rode and the same bus that the Unabomber rode back to Lincoln after mailing the Manifesto to the New York Times and Washington Post.

He remembers the man who came to his door who also wanted Campbell to remember.

Identifying himself as Special Agent Gray of the FBI, he wanted to know if Campbell remembered the man in the picture, Ted Kaczynski. He wanted to know where Campbell had driven him and what he looked like and if he had spoken to him, and then the man wanted Campbell to forget Special Agent Gray had come to the door at all.

That turned out to be difficult when Campbell saw Gray in town, pretending not to be a special agent at all. Trying to blend in during the investigation, Gray drove a pickup around town. Campbell was told to act as though they had never spoken.

Campbell had driven Kaczynski three or four times from Missoula to Lincoln, the last time near the holiday season of 1995. He remembers him as a quiet passenger, almost unremarkable except for a green army jacket and a small bag. It is a description that other bus drivers would share with Special Agent Gray.

Another bus driver, Larry Peterson, told Gray he had driven Kaczynski on his bus route, always from Lincoln to Missoula. He remembered Kaczynski standing outside in his army jacket, away from the other passengers, waiting for the bus to come by in the cold.

Ted Kaczynski was a solitary man. The people who saw him remember that solitude as part of their own stories. Skeldon’s stack of letters. Campbell’s shoebox of clippings. Although Ted Kaczynski was only a lone passenger, he is also a few earmarked pages of their lives.