Bomb Victims: Strangers Linked by Terror

For the Unabomber’s targets and the friends and relatives of those killed or maimed in his blasts, the arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski in Montana does not end the nightmare.

In a span of 17 years, the Unabomber killed three people, wounded 23 and left countless other psychological victims from New Jersey to Tennessee to California.

Patrick Fischer, head of Vanderbilt University’s computer science department, will continue to examine carefully every package that crosses his desk, arrest or not.

“I will be careful for the rest of my life,” he said.

Like others, he will also wonder forever why the bomber singled him out--and why fate ruled that he would be spared. It was in 1982 that his secretary, Janet Smith, opened a package intended for him and was severely injured when a pipe bomb blew up in her face.

“For a while I thought he [the bomber] opened up Who’s Who and threw a dart until he got a computer scientist,” Fischer said. “That’s probably wrong. There has to be a link.”

Donn E. Zea, vice president of the California Forestry Assn., said a dentist appointment on April 24, 1995, may have saved his life--while taking that of a colleague.

While Zea was away, Gilbert Murray, the lobby group’s president, opened the Unabomber’s package. The resulting blast killed Murray instantly and sent hundreds of panicked workers streaming out of the building into the streets.

“I’m not ashamed to say that for the first month I felt something I can describe no better than a sense of paranoia,” Zea said. “I was looking under my car, checking our doors and windows. I knew it wasn’t logical, especially since we knew the so-called Unabomber never struck the same victim twice. But we were never sure.”

The impact of the blast, of course, was even more devastating to Murray’s family. His wife, Connie, a teacher, stopped working for a time. His older son, who had been admitted to Cornell University on an athletic scholarship, chose instead to go to a local college.

The forestry association employees not only lost an admired boss but realized how close they had come to becoming victims themselves.

A pregnant staff assistant, who had handed Murray the scissors he used to open the package, had walked down a hall to her office, just turning a corner at the moment of the blast. Another employee had left the area where Murray opened the package to get a phone number from another part of the office.

The staff was planning a commemoration of the event when news of Kaczynski’s arrest came. Zea said that staff members still intend to go ahead with requests to Congress and the state Legislature to officially recognize the anniversary. And they will encourage association members and residents in communities that depend on the timber industry to remember Murray by wearing green ribbons on April 24.

The FBI had considered years ago uniting all of the victims in hopes that they would figure out connections among them that had eluded investigators. But that plan was scratched and they live today in an odd fraternity--tied together by a shadowy bomber with most of them never having met.

Kaczynski’s arrest did bring considerable relief. As details of his life began filtering out, those tied to the Unabomber’s rage began trying to figure out how they might have ended up on his twisted list.

“I hope that, in fact, we do have the Unabomber and we can bring this case to some closure,” said John E. Hauser, who was working on a master’s degree at Berkeley and dreamed of becoming an astronaut until a bomb shattered his right arm in 1985.

Hauser, now a professor at the University of Colorado, said that he still remembers the devastating aftermath of the explosion as he screamed for help amid a pool of blood and cradled his wounded arm. So tremendous was the blast that his Air Force Academy ring flew across the room, piercing the wall behind him.

As for why he might have been targeted, Hauser still doesn’t know.

Zea speculated that the Unabomber might have targeted the forestry association because of publicity over a new industry-funded computer study of the Northern spotted owl, which indicated that timber harvesting could continue without threatening the species.

Fischer, the Vanderbilt computer scientist, has found a series of odd coincidences with the suspect, all of which he has passed along to the FBI.

For one, Fischer’s father was a mathematics professor at the University of Michigan while Kaczynski was a graduate student there. Also, Fischer was in Cambridge, Mass., as an undergraduate at the same time Kaczynski was studying there, although Kaczynski was at Harvard and Fischer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The fear for my safety evaporated about three months after the bomb,” Fischer said. “I figured that based on the other cases it was unlikely that he was going to come here and stalk me.”

But he could never put the case behind him. His secretary recovered and continued working for him, always refusing to discuss what happened. The FBI would come calling after each successive attack. And the news media would descend upon him as well.

“Is it over?” he asked. “It will always be a part of my life.”