|
The Unabomber began the epistolary striptease that in the end brought him down. Using, as was his custom, the madman's we, he wrote to the New York Times, taunting his hunters. "It doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us anytime soon,&quo
t; the letter said. He wrote to an earlier victim, Yale professor David Gelernter, saying, "If you had any brains, you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the wor
ld, and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source." Soon he was writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, threatening to blow up an airplane out of Los Angeles, which caused security to be tightened for sev
eral days. He promised to stop if the Times and the Washington Post would publish his magnum opus, a 35,000-word screed against industrial society and modern civilization. He said he was growing tired of making bombs. "Certainly his ending his level
of seclusion to the point of submitting the manifesto and writing letters," says Ken Thompson, a domestic-terrorism specialist who retired from the FBI last year, "indicated someone at a point in his life where he wanted to gain the popularity o
f what he had done."
When Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh consulted the publishers of the Post and the Times, they wrestled together over whether they should appear to give in to a terrorist in the hope of stopping the bombings--or worse, provoke h
im to greater violence by acceding to the demands. But the investigators wanted to take the gamble that some professor, some family member, someone who knew the killer would hear echoes of a friend or student or relative. They were hoping, in short, for D
avid.
David Kaczynski was living in Schenectady, New York, working at a shelter for runaway children. Eight years younger than Ted, he had purchased the Montana land with his brother years before, and occasionally retreated to his own isolated cabin in East
Texas that he bought more than 10 years ago. About five years ago, he moved to Schenectady to marry a high school sweetheart, Linda Patrik, an associate professor of philosophy at Union College. It is not clear how much contact he had in recent years with
his hermit brother. If David was in touch with Ted, did he ever notice that bombs started going off when his brother went traveling?
Whatever doubts David had, whatever unholy fears, became impossible to ignore late last year when he went home to Chicago to help his mother Wanda move out of the small, gray house she had lived in for nearly 30 years. In sorting through their old boxe
s and trunks, David came upon some of Ted's journals and letters he had written to newspapers years earlier that suddenly sounded darkly familiar. Through a friend, a lawyer in Washington, David made tentative contact with the FBI, and an agent eventually
persuaded him to come forward. When FBI agents searched a small shed behind the house, they found bombmaking materials. David pointed them to the Montana cabin, and they began the stakeout, which ended sooner than expected when news of the suspect leaked
to a CBS reporter. Word of David's cooperation also leaked, despite assurances of anonymity from the FBI, and at week's end he and his mother Wanda were besieged by minicams at their Schenectady home, to the horror of their FBI handlers.
Ted Kaczynski, meanwhile, broke one or two sly smiles during his arraignment in Helena, Montana, but was otherwise docile and impassive. He had taken the cliche about serial killers--he was a quiet boy, never got in any trouble--and raised it to an art
form. He had cast no shadow, left no prints, made few friends, right up until the moment he vanished into the woods.
[ Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 |
Page 5 ]
|
