Montana Town’s Innocence Is Replaced by Media Glare

At first glance, life in this rugged stretch of the Blackfoot River Valley has returned to normal more than 18 months after being jolted by the arrest of longtime resident Theodore Kaczynski as the suspected Unabomber.

On a recent morning, a big black dog lolled in the middle of Highway 200, the town’s one-stoplight main drag. Unabomber memorabilia have almost disappeared from shops and bars. Mom’s Drive-In Cafe no longer sells Unaburgers. Even Kaczynski’s tiny shack has been carted off intact to an Air Force base to gather dust.

Inside that cabin, prosecutors say, they found bomb components and a typewriter linking Kaczynski to a 17-year bombing rampage in which three people died and at least 28 were injured.

Kaczynski’s alleged responsibility for that destruction has cast a shadow on this Continental Divide village and the rest of his adopted state, a place where people like to see themselves as untainted by the hubbub of the outside world.

The Chicago native is awaiting trial Nov. 12 in Sacramento in connection with four of the blasts. None of the attacks took place in Big Sky country, but his arrest seems to have robbed some Montanans of their innocent belief that only big cities are magnets for criminal minds, not their beloved state.

To a few families in Lincoln who knew Kaczynski best, the sense of loss remains strong.

“They had a friend. How would you feel if you had a friend . . . who misrepresented himself?” asked the Rev. Jack Preston, pastor of Community United Methodist Church in Lincoln. It’s difficult, he said, to “reconcile that you so misjudged the situation.”

“If in fact he is [the Unabomber], it’s pretty shocking,” said Preston, whose congregation includes many of those who knew Kaczynski.

Preston and others in Ted Kaczynski’s Montana offer a variety of views about whether the Harvard University-educated mathematician’s story sheds any light on life in their state, where urban refugees seeking a back-to-nature lifestyle increasingly mix with natives.

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However, they seem united in wishing that Kaczynski’s upcoming trial will end quickly and with it the unwelcome glare of the national media spotlight.

Residents of Lincoln insist they had no inkling that the onetime math whiz might be anything other than a well-read loner whom they would see pedaling a battered red bike.

“This is a town that respects people’s privacy, and there’s no reason to question,” Preston said.

With thick stands of lodgepole pine, this corner of western Montana is a jumping-off spot for snowmobilers, hunters, gold miners and loggers. In the wake of Kaczynski’s arrest, one bumper strip proclaimed Lincoln, with a population of around 1,000, “the last best hiding place.”

For a quarter of a century, Kaczynski called the woodlands of the Blackfoot River Valley home.

In 1971, he and his brother, David, purchased about 1 1/2 acres five miles from the small commercial strip that forms the center of Lincoln. Theodore Kaczynski built a one-room, rough-hewn shack no bigger than some closets. He lived off the land, without electricity or plumbing.

After his arrest in 1996, FBI agents searching the cabin found a carbon copy of a 67-page treatise titled “Industrial Society and Its Future.” In 1995, the Unabomber had pledged not to kill again if the manifesto was printed in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

After the publication in September 1995 of the anti-technology manifesto, David Kaczynski, a New York social worker, privately suggested to the FBI that his older brother might be the elusive Unabomber.

In federal court in Sacramento, Kaczynski is charged in a 10-count indictment of using bombs to kill two people in Sacramento and injuring two others.

Kaczynski has pleaded not guilty and has indicated in court documents that he may offer a mental defense, saying he is a paranoid schizophrenic. But Kaczynski has balked at a court-ordered mental examination by government psychologists.

His attorneys also have battled prosecutors over their decision to seek the death penalty if Kaczynski is found guilty.

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The capture of Kaczynski, 55, climaxed one of the longest manhunts in U.S. history. But in Montana, it was just the kickoff of a public drama that began to unfold at the same time as the anti-government Freemen were in an 81-day standoff with federal law officers in eastern Montana.

Lonie Stimac, director of the Montana Film Commission, said that the notoriety sparked by the two high-profile cases hasn’t diminished interest in filming movies in her state.

“No one has said, ‘I’m not coming to Montana. You guys are a bunch of kooks,’ ” Stimac said. The attention focused on Lincoln hasn’t hurt business either at chain saw artist Rick J. Rowley’s Lost Woodsman Gallery.

Rowley recalled that his wife had seen Kaczynski in the Lincoln gallery looking around. “You wouldn’t have thought anything,” he said, adding that Kaczynski appeared to be just another local browsing.

Now the artist has sold four $298 wooden sculptures of Kaczynski clutching a bomb. Rowley described his 27-inch-high creation as “my interpretation. He’s kind of wild and fiery.” Rowley cautioned that he doesn’t look at Kaczynski as a hero.

Others say that recent publicity about the bombing victims, especially a new book, “Drawing Life, Surviving the Unabomber” by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, has brought into focus their attitude toward the Unabomber case.

“We tend to lose sight of the devastation caused,” said Maureen Fisher, former owner of the local newspaper. “This brought us back to reality.

Her husband, Rollie Fisher, who heads up a community advisory council in unincorporated Lincoln, said, “No one in this community knew Ted Kaczynski . . . assuming he is the Unabomber. . . . And I stress the word knew.”

Pharmacist Duane Hovland sold vitamins to Kaczynski. He described Kaczynski’s dress as shabby, recalling his old Army fatigue jacket and jeans with holes.

“I don’t think he should get the death penalty. I don’t think they would have ever caught him without his brother,” Hovland said.

“He’s insane. Who could live in a house no bigger than this?” Hovland said, gesturing to a cramped section of his pharmacy.

Besides riding his bike into town, Kaczynski regularly left his hillside lair for longer trips.

Lincoln librarian Sherry Wood told FBI agents that Kaczynski “hops on a bus and goes and visits a lot more than anyone thought,” meaning Kaczynski traveled elsewhere in the state for supplies or groceries.

Wood recently told the Sacramento Bee: “There were a lot of untruths told about Ted. He was a kind, gentle man when he was here.” She and some others are considering coming to Sacramento to show support for Kaczynski.

Dick Lundberg, a former mail carrier who would give Kaczynski lifts 55 miles into Helena, acknowledged that he is trying to put together a Sacramento delegation. “But financially I don’t know if we can swing it,” Lundberg said.

In downtown Helena, J.R. McCabe, who owns the Park Hotel on Last Chance Gulch, where Kaczynski stayed 31 times between 1982 and 1995, depicted Kaczynski as an anomaly.

“He was a loner. He didn’t represent Montana. He just represented himself,” McCabe said. He recalled that Kaczynski would pop into his dimly lit lobby carrying a backpack like those that students take to school and would request the least expensive room.

Not long ago, McCabe said FBI agents and two mental experts called on him, in part to get a feel for one of the simple rooms he rented. They stayed inside, he said, “just 20 seconds.”

Across the street, agents visited Aunt Bonnie’s Books, where Kaczynski purchased books on political science and other topics.

“To me, people in Montana, at least people I’ve talked to, are less interested in it [the Unabomber case] than the rest of the nation,” said bookstore manager Anna Haire. “They don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Haire said she hasn’t stocked Gelernter’s new book.

At Lewis and Clark County offices in Helena, County Atty. Mike McGrath said he hopes that Kaczynski is convicted.

“It’s just a coincidence he lived in Montana,” McGrath said. “Our county has a number of remote areas. . . . It doesn’t say anything about Montana. He could have ended up anywhere.”