Pieces of Wood, a Look, a Letter Mark Long Trail

With each new explosion, investigators painstakingly reconstructed the Unabomber’s bombs, piecing together scattered bits of flashlight batteries, lamp cords, matchsticks and the lovingly carved wooden components that would ultimately be recognized as his signature.

They went off on tangents. Once they scurried after a mysterious message--”Call Nathan R wed 7 pm”--that had been imprinted, invisibly, on one of his communiques. The FBI scoured drivers’ licenses and phone books, tracking down some 12,000 Nathan Rs across the land.

They tried to gather DNA samples from stamps the Unabomber may have licked. They stored 22 million pieces of information in computer databases, including names of countless students who had been refused grants. They raided the house of a Colorado Springs, Colo., man who, neighbors complained, darkened all his windows--one of hundreds of wrongly targeted folks who were not dangerous, just weird.

They even posted a message on the Internet about the bomber’s modus operandi. “We want to cover all our bases,” an FBI spokesman said at the time.

For the hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement authorities who worked on the “Unabom” case since the first explosion in Chicago in 1978, the investigation was for the most part a lengthy exercise in frustration, lurching from one false start to the next. Thousands of leads were pursued. All turned up dry until now.

“He’s been driving us up the wall for 18 years,” said Bob Holland, a retired explosives expert for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who worked on the case for 11 years.

Years of Frustration

Some years, such as 1987, when the only known sighting of the bomber in Salt Lake City led to the widely circulated drawing of a mustachioed, hooded suspect--investigators thought that they were tantalizingly close. Authorities carted that picture around to countless places, hoping to turn up a lead. They found nothing.

Other years, including the six that the bomber was silent--1987 to 1993--the Unabomber seemed as cruel and distant as ever. Back then, Holland said, the going theory was that the Unabomber was in prison or maybe dead.

“God Almighty,” said Pete Smerick, a former FBI behavioral scientist who helped draft the psychological profile of the killer, “you’ve got a country of 250 million people, and, unless the person does something that really attracts your attention, you’re following a lot of false leads.”

In the end, if the suspect in Montana turns out to be the Unabomber, the best lead will have come from the killer himself--the 35,000-word manifesto that law enforcement authorities said prompted a Schenectady, N.Y., man to turn in his own brother.

Experts said that the FBI was wise in persuading newspapers to print the volume. It was, said Smerick, their only shot at having someone connect the writings to a suspect they could not find on their own. If Theodore John Kaczynski is ultimately charged with the Unabomber’s crimes, Smerick said, it will mean that “his ego finally got the better of him.”

Kaczynski, a 53-year-old graduate of Harvard University and former assistant math professor at UC Berkeley, was charged Thursday with possessing a partly made bomb. Authorities searched his Montana cabin and found “meticulous writings and sketches” of explosive devices, according to an FBI affidavit, but they are waiting to complete their search before bringing any additional charges.

Patient Craftsman

Christopher Ronay, a former explosives expert at the FBI who was one of the lead agents on the case, once described the Unabomber as “one of the most creative and elusive serial bombers ever encountered.” He struck in odd patterns. Until last year’s release of his manifesto, which made clear his rage against science and technology, it was difficult to pinpoint his motives.

He fashioned his bombs from scratch, blending four varieties of wood and using common items, such as lamp cords, that made him particularly difficult to trace. He made switches by hand instead of buying them. Metal parts were lovingly polished.

“A tremendous amount of patience was involved in building one of his devices,” said Holland, the retired ATF agent. “It’s a shame he didn’t have the same amount of patience with society, isn’t it?”

Often the killer inserted a metal tab with his trademark: the initials “FC.” The letters mystified his trackers. “We had several round robins as to what that could possibly mean,” said Holland. The puzzle was solved when the Unabomber said in one letter that they stood for Freedom Club.

One of the biggest dilemmas authorities faced was that so much time had elapsed since the first bombing in 1978. The Unabomber’s philosophy seemed to be that slow and steady wins the race. He would strike in spurts and then let years pass before surfacing again. On average, he struck a little less often than annually--16 times in 17 years.

“That isn’t exactly a lot of behavior to analyze,” said Smerick. “It isn’t the same as a serial rapist, where every couple of weeks he strikes again.”

In retrospect, the patterns that would come to distinguish the Unabomber were evident from the beginning. But back then, in May, 1978, there was no such thing as the Unabomber. In his earliest incarnation, the Unabomber had no name. Then postal inspectors dubbed him Junkyard Bomber because they believed that the metal he used in his bombs came from junkyards. The name later was switched to Unabomber because it appeared that he was targeting universities and airlines.

He made his debut on May 26, 1978, when a package was found in a parking lot at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois. The woman who discovered it returned it to the man whose name was listed as the sender--a professor at Northwestern University. But the professor had not sent the package, and he gave it to campus security. The security guard who opened it was wounded when it exploded.

The debris from that bomb bore all the features that would become the hallmarks of the killer--pieces of wood, match heads and smokeless powder. The following year, two similar bombs appeared.

The first, concealed in a cigar box, exploded in an engineering building at Northwestern University on May 9, 1979. The second exploded in the baggage compartment of an American Airlines 727 jetliner, en route from Chicago to Washington, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. The bomb was constructed from two wooden triggering devices and was much like the Northwestern University device. It incorporated a booby-trap: a loop switch made of lamp cord, designed to make the bomb explode should the unsuspecting victim lift the lid off the box.

By that time, the FBI was fairly certain that it was looking for a serial bomber. Forensic analysis, Ronay wrote in a 1991 article in Police Chief magazine, disclosed that the three bombs had been “constructed in such a singular fashion that the bomber virtually left his signature on his work.”

Deadly Patterns

The Unabomber was most active in the early 1980s, striking eight times in the first half of that decade--four times in 1985 alone. All the bombs bore his identifying marks. But by 1985, Ronay wrote, he had improved on his devices with “a new explosive filler--a more powerful ammonium nitrate mixture capable of producing a more lethal explosion.”

On Dec. 11 of that year, the Unabomber claimed his first life.

The Unabomber’s 11th bomb was disguised as a road hazard, constructed of wooden boards and nails. It was left in a parking lot behind a computer rental store in Sacramento. When computer dealer Hugh Campbell Scrutton reached down to pick up the package, it exploded, killing him.

Retired Sacramento sheriff’s Lt. Ray Biondi oversaw that case. He was surprised when FBI agents showed up at the crime scene. There had been no publicity about a serial bomber, and Biondi had no way of knowing that the incident was not isolated.

“We were dumbfounded that a series [of bombings] had been going on but hadn’t been publicized,” Biondi said. “When we realized that he nearly brought down an airliner in 1979, that sort of astounded us, that there had never been a public warning.”

Biondi pressed the FBI to release more information. Finally they agreed to reveal that Scrutton’s death was connected to a bloody trail that had been left across the nation over the past seven years. The authorities tracked a couple of local suspects, Biondi said, but it quickly became apparent that “the answers were somewhere other than Sacramento.”

The trail grew cold. Then in 1987, authorities got what they thought was going to be their big break, when, for the first and only time, somebody in Salt Lake City saw what may have been the Unabomber.

The date was Feb. 20. A woman looking through a window spotted a white man in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses carrying some wooden boards in a laundry bag. As he put the bag down in the parking lot behind the Caams Computer Store, the woman banged on the window, motioning for him to move the unusual package. He looked at her and walked away. Less than an hour later, the bomb exploded, injuring the store’s owner, Gary Wright.

It was from that sighting that an artist drew a composite of the Unabomber suspect, a drawing that Holland said was circulated all over the world.

“We thought, ‘Now, we’re going to get a break on this guy,” he recalled. Investigators shopped the sketch around to hundreds of junkyards and scrap metal dealers, asking them if they had sold any pipe of the sort used by the Unabomber. “You just keep tracking and tracking ‘til you get to a dead-end and there’s no place else to go,” Holland said. “And then you sit back and wait for the next lead.”

Many of the leads came from the public, from people who thought they recognized the man in the sketch. “We had a lot of possible hits on people that looked like him or people that wore those hooded sweatshirts and sunglasses. We were aggravating an awful lot of college kids, I’ll tell you that,” Holland said.

By this time, investigators from the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit had developed a profile of the Unabomber. He would be a white man in his mid-30s to early 40s who probably spent his formative years in Chicago, where the initial incidents occurred. He would have at least a high school education, with the possibility of some college or trade school.

Silent Years

He would be “lacking in social skills and self-esteem” and would have a checkered employment history, mostly menial jobs. The obsessive-compulsive tendencies demonstrated in his bombs would carry over to his private life. He might dress neatly, be a list-maker and, Ronay wrote in the 1991 article, “have a meticulously organized lifestyle.”

The next six years were slow ones. It was not until 1993, when the Unabomber resurfaced, that, Smerick said, “we kind of resurrected our case.”

That year, the killer struck twice, mailing two bombs from Sacramento. One blew off the fingers of a geneticist at UC San Francisco. The other injured the fingers and abdomen of a computer scientist at Yale University.

The bomber also sent a note to the New York Times warning of those bombings. Smerick said that he and seven or eight other agents from the FBI’s behavioral science lab in Quantico, Va., pored over that note and other missives from the Unabomber, spending hours trying to read clues into his syntax and writing style.

No Nut Case

“His sentence structure was very good,” Smerick said. “He could string together long sentences and paragraphs. There was a clear thought process. It wasn’t the type of letter that you would get and say: ‘This is a nut case.’ ”

The profile that emerged at that time, Smerick said, was essentially unchanged. It was not until last June, when the Unabomber sent his 35,000-page manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post, that a much more detailed picture of the bomber emerged as a highly educated man who was enraged at society’s technological advances.

“When he produced that manuscript,” said Smerick, who by that time had retired, “he gave my colleagues an opportunity of really studying him based upon his own words and thoughts.”

Yet all that careful scrutiny failed to produce an arrest. Then the FBI encouraged the newspapers to print the manifesto. Both the newspapers and the agency were criticized by those who said they were catering to the Unabomber.

But with the arrest of Kaczynski, whose brother became suspicious when he found similar writings at the family’s Lombard, Ill., home, the publication of the manifesto may have been the smartest attack on the Unabomber in 18 years.

* PETER H. KING: Until now, the Unabomber was almost an abstract concept. A3

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Trail of Bombings

Federal agents suspect Theodore Kaczynski may be the Unabomber. Below the bombing linked to the Unabomber and the order in which they occurred.

ACROSS THE COUNTRY

1,2) Evanston, Ill.

3) Washington, D.C.

4) Chicago, Ill.

5,12) Salt Lake City, Utah

6) Nashville, Tenn.

7,8) Berkeley, Calif.

9) Auburn, Wash.

10) Ann Arbor, Mich.

11,16) Sacramento, Calif.

13) San Francisco, Calif.

14) New Haven, Conn.

15) North Caldwell, N.J.

Source: Associated Press