Suspect’s Typewriter May Match Unabomber’s

Bomb-wary federal agents, picking their way as carefully as brain surgeons through Theodore J. Kaczynski’s mountain cabin, have found a typewriter that seems to be the one used to write a manuscript sent by the Unabomber during his reign of terror, government sources said Friday.

The agents have filled 40 boxes with evidence, including a second typewriter and material that could be used to make bombs, one source said. Authorities announced that evidence against Kaczynski, 53, a former UC Berkeley mathematics professor, would be presented to a federal grand jury on April 17 in Great Falls, Mont.

Kaczynski, under a suicide watch at the county jail in Helena, Mont., waived his right to a preliminary hearing on a charge of possessing a partly built bomb that the agents found three days ago in the cabin loft. He also waived his right to a quick bond hearing, choosing instead to await the conclusion of the grand jury before deciding whether to seek bail.

Prosecutor Bernard Hubley has asked the federal court to hold Kaczynski without bail. “This defendant is both a flight risk and a danger to the community,” Hubley said. Federal authorities suspect that Kaczynski is the Unabomber, who has killed three people and injured 23 others in a 17-year crusade against universities, industries and the airlines.

Agents at his cabin in Stemple Pass, near the Continental Divide, were sending both typewriters to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for tests, the government sources said. They said there seemed to be a preliminary match between the peculiarities of the letters on one of the typewriters and the peculiarities of letters in the Unabomber’s manuscript.

The manuscript was sent last summer to the New York Times and the Washington Post. If they printed it, the Unabomber said, he would stop killing people. The newspapers jointly published the manuscript, a 35,000-word treatise on the inhumanity of industrial society. Other news organizations used excerpts. There has not been a Unabombing since.

If the preliminary match between the typewriter and the manuscript stands up during tests at the FBI laboratory, “it would be an absolutely key piece of evidence,” said Oliver B. “Buck” Revell, former assistant director in charge of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, who oversaw the hunt for the Unabomber from 1980 to 1991.

Laboratory technicians already have determined that the typewriter used to write the manuscript also apparently produced typing found at the scenes of bombings and attempted bombings attributed to the Unabomber, the government sources said. Similarly, they said, there was an apparent match to letters sent to newspapers, allegedly by the Unabomber.

The lab has ruled out potential suspects by failing to match the Unabomber manuscript with typewriters linked to them, one source said. The testing examines tiny imperfections on typefaces, as well as other characteristics that create distinctive features on typewritten material.

The FBI will need only two or three days to complete the testing of typewriters found in Kaczynski’s cabin, Revell and other sources said.

At the same time, Kaczynski’s fingerprints were being checked against “less than 50 latents,” or scarcely visible prints, on material and devices that the FBI has recovered from the scenes of Unabomber attacks and on some of the Unabomber letters, one source said.

The cabin search was being conducted with great care because authorities feared it might be booby-trapped. An explosives ordnance team X-rayed everything before the agents touched it. The search was expected to continue through Sunday, said one FBI agent who asked not to be identified.

The FBI hoped to file an affidavit, perhaps by Tuesday, listing everything it has found.

Kaczynski’s suicide watch was routine for high-profile prisoners, said Chuck O’Reilly, the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County. He said Kaczynski had shown no suicidal tendencies.

He was being watched, nonetheless, O’Reilly said, by a deputy who was keeping an eye on Kaczynski’s one-man cell through a large window. Kaczynski paced a lot inside the cell, the sheriff said, but he was cooperative and was eating his meals.

“A very, very important part of the remaining investigation,” Revell said, was how Kaczynski could have traveled from his cabin, in a remote area five miles south of this tiny town, to Sacramento and other cities where the Unabomber mailed lethal packages and otherwise left his fingerprints.

“I don’t think,” Revell said, “there’s any indication anyone worked with him on this.”

Revell, as well as others close to the case, noted that Kaczynski had a driver’s license and could have rented a car.

“You can also do well hitchhiking,” one source noted.

Revell said he thought it was unlikely that the Unabomber suspect would have flown, because he was opposed to technology, including airplanes. “I think it’s more likely,” Revell said, “that he took surface transportation.”

Another source suggested buses. “He wasn’t in a hurry,” this source noted. “He had no time constraints--nothing to get back to. He wouldn’t be missed from the job.”

On a bus, one source said, “nobody pays attention to somebody carrying a box wrapped with twine.” Passengers on buses, the source noted, are “hard to track and trace.”

The FBI national press office distributed a statement emphasizing that “the toll-free telephone hot line to the UNABOM Task Force is still in operation. Anyone with information related to this ongoing investigation is encouraged to call 1-800-701-2662, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

An FBI spokesman declined to elaborate, but another source said that because the FBI had not determined how Kaczynski got around, it wanted to encourage anyone to call who had seen him “out and about.”

Another important question was how Kaczynski got the money to travel. A neighbor, Butch Gehring, told Associated Press that Kaczynski always refused to reveal how he made a living. But Gehring recalled him saying at one point that his cost of living had risen from $200 to $300 a year.

Gehring, who owns a lumber business in Lincoln, said he had hired Kaczynski a decade ago to peel logs. But he did not like the job, Gehring said, and he quit on his first day.

Four FBI agents blocked access to the dirt road that leads from Lincoln to Kaczynski’s cabin. Reporters and photographers stood on the roadway most of the day hoping to obtain access to the property or to make photos of evidence being removed from the cabin.

The first tourists arrived.

Andrea Ocvampo, 17, an exchange student from Costa Rica, posed for snapshots next to an old roadside mailbox with the faded name TED KACZYNSKI written on one side.

Then she posed with an obliging FBI agent.

Dave Kirkaldie, 43, from the town of Dodson, 350 miles away in eastern Montana, brought his family to the dirt road as they passed through Lincoln on their way to an Easter holiday with relatives.

“It’s kind of exciting,” he said.

Kaczynski’s brother, David, 46, and their mother, Wanda, secluded themselves in David Kaczynski’s small green-and-white frame house in Schenectady, N.Y., as a small army of reporters camped on the street outside.

Drapes were drawn over the windows. Telephone calls and all pleas at the front door for information went unanswered.

When a delivery man appeared with flowers, reporters swarmed on the porch, and a cameraman climbed to the top of the fragile porch railing. The flowers remained outside.

Mary Ann Welch, a next-door neighbor who has been acting as David Kaczynski’s spokeswoman, appealed for privacy.

“These are people of great integrity,” she said. “They are private people, caring and compassionate individuals. They are going through a very stressful time. They respect your right to be here, and they ask that you respect their right to remain silent.

“It is their choice,” she said.

Welch said the Kaczynskis had all the provisions they needed and would not emerge soon. She said the family had no intention of speaking to the press.

It was David Kaczynski, sources said, who turned over documents that prompted the FBI to take his brother into custody. He had read the Unabomber’s manuscript when it was published and then found the documents in a family home in Illinois while he was cleaning it for sale.

They seemed similar, sources said.

Neighbors described David Kaczynski as a man of few words who keeps to himself. Sometimes he would play a guitar on the front porch of his home.

His wife, Linda E. Patrik, likes gardening, the neighbors said, and served as a neighborhood advisor to people who had less luck growing things than she did.

David Kaczynski met his wife when they were high school students in Illinois. They were married five years ago in a backyard Buddhist ceremony under a trellis the couple gave to each other as a wedding gift.

She graduated from Carleton College in 1973 and received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Northwestern University. She is now an associate professor of philosophy at Union College, about five minutes from the house.

This semester she is teaching a variety of courses, including the philosophy of existential literature, which explores such themes as individuality and freedom and social conformity.

David Kaczynski graduated from Columbia University, where he majored in English. He works in Albany, N.Y., as a counselor at Equinox, a nonprofit organization that helps troubled youth. The group also operates a center for victims of domestic violence.

David Kaczynski worked with runaways. In a television interview last year, he spoke eloquently of their plight, how they were hungry and slept in cardboard boxes and rummaged through trash in search of meals.

Welch said that Wanda Kaczynski sometimes would talk of her other son as an “isolationist” who lived in a one-room house in the Montana wilderness.

Paddock reported from Lincoln, Ostrow from Washington and Lieberman from Los Angeles. Kim Murphy in Lincoln, John J. Goldman in Schenectady and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.