Reporter’s Notebook: On the trail of the Unabomber

No town had closer connections to the case of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski than Sacramento: His first and last murder victims over a 17-year period occurred here – the first in an alley behind an Arden Fair computer-rental store, the last in an office downtown across from the state Attorney General’s office on I Street.

Kaczynski, 81, who entered Harvard on a scholarship at age 16 and taught mathematics at UC Berkeley in his mid-20s, died on June 10^th in a North Carolina federal prison medical facility, where he had been transferred two years before from “Supermax,” a maximum security lockup in Colorado. Several sources told AP late Sunday that he died by his own hand.

His death, not surprisingly, prompted a flurry of obituaries across the country and I won’t add to those. But I will offer my own recollections of the case.

Between 1978 and 1995, he roamed the nation planting bombs that injured, maimed and horribly killed his victims. His base was in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived in the forest in a 10-by-14 cabin that he built after leaving UC Berkeley. The cabin was his home for 25 years. Later, as the FBI tracked him down, agents said Kaczynski, amazingly, would stay inside the cabin for days on end without going outside.

Kaczynski defined himself as a warrior in the fight against technology and burgeoning government, an environmental activist battling developers, and he accordingly selected his victims. He wrote a 35,000-word manifesto entitled “Industrial Society and its Future,” which the New York Times and Washington Post published in its entirety. Kaczysnki had written the papers, saying that if they published his treatise, he wouldn’t kill again. They did, and he didn’t.

But Kacyznski’s triumph was short-lived. His brother, David, recognized characteristics in the account that led him to believe his brother had written it and he tipped off authorities. That ultimately led the FBI to the Montana cabin and Kaczynski’s arrest, and his return to Sacramento for indictment and trial.

Two of Kaczynski’s slain victims, computer store owner Hugh Scrutton in 1985 and timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray in 1995, were Sacramento residents with a wide circle of local friends. The Unabomber’s third fatality was Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive. Kaczynski was not charged with that crime. Some two dozen people were injured in the attacks.

In Sacramento, the “media circus” – a cliché but no exaggeration – began.

Kaczynski defined himself as a warrior in the fight against technology and burgeoning government, an environmental activist battling developers, and he accordingly selected his victims.

An empty lot near the court was jammed with satellite trucks, TV vans, cables, reporters, technicians, security guards and assorted hangers-on.

One floor of a nearby office building was turned into a communications center and taken over by broadcast and print reporters. That dismayed the building’s tenants, who included an array of union-busting law firms, who viewed the journalists as a howling mob and wanted them thrown out. They probably would have been but Kaczynski, hoping to keep the death penalty off the table, pleaded out to 10 counts before the trial got underway and the media frenzy finally evaporated.

Meanwhile, Kaczynski’s Montana cabin was uprooted, stuck on a trailer and towed 1,000 miles to Sacramento, followed by a gaggle of reporters. One radio reporter told me it was the best assignment he ever had, and he should know – he’d covered everything from assassinations to earthquakes. The cabin produced a trove of evidence that prosecutors planned to use at the trial.

At AP, we were tipped that the U.S. Attorney’s office was bringing in witnesses from outside, including Ted’s brother David Kaczynski, and installing them in a local motel under tight security until they testified at trial. I and a photographer scoured the city from Alhambra to Old Sacramento, from Broadway to G Street, figuring that wherever they were, it wouldn’t be too far from the courthouse. We hoped we could get a glimpse of David and maybe land an interview. We drove around for hours and came up empty handed. Later, to our chagrin, we learned that the witnesses had been put up at a Vagabond Inn – which was one of the motels we checked.

Some tips did pan out, others not so much:

– Kaczynski sometimes stayed in Sacramento, and the manager at a 7^th Street hotel recalled him and provided details about his visit. While we were talking, his desk phone rang and a reporter was on the line. “Nah, I can’t talk now. I’m talking to AP,” the manager said and hung up. I loved it.

– The letters “FC” had been scrawled on a bulletin board at Sacramento State. FC was an identifier that Kaczynski used, and authorities believed he had written the letters during a visit to the university campus.

– Some residents in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento heard explosions at night over a period of several weeks, and they believed the Unabomber was doing practice runs. Authorities investigated, but didn’t turn up anything.

– Amazingly, some 600 people were called as potential jurors for the trial. They crowded into a facility at the CalExpo fairgrounds and filled out lengthy questionnaires. Reporters were kept away from the jury pool, the first time that potential federal jurors for the court gathered anywhere but in the downtown courthouse.

– Ted Kaczynski kept an encoded diary of several hundred pages written in pencil. Federal prosecutors in Sacramento said the diary – a portion of the 20,000 documents retrieved from Kacynski’s shack, was the “backbone” of their case. In it, Kaczynski detailed his bombings from 1978 through 1995. The diary was not released, but several sources told AP that the diary was “a sophisticated jumble of numbers, an intricate enigma wrapped in a riddle …” The FBI quickly cracked the code and sent a decoded version to prosecutors.

– From his arrest and mug shot photos, Kaczynski, 54, looked like the prototypical mad bomber – unkempt hair and beard, intense demeanor and odd stares into the middle distance. This reporter also had unkempt hair – less now, though – and a beard, prompting Gov. Wilson to quip at a press conference: “Has anybody ever seen John Howard and Ted Kaczynski in the same room at the same time?” In court appearances and during his transfer to Sacramento, Kaczynski’s appearance was transformed. His beard and hair were neatly trimmed and he was casually dressed in a sport coat and slacks, looking more like the college professor he once was – pictured above for this story – rather than an accused killer.