Kaczynski’s Journals May Be Star of Trial

Los Angeles went through the O.J. Simpson trials. Denver is going through its second Oklahoma City bombing trial.

Now California’s capital is the backdrop to the nation’s latest marquee trial: the case of Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski.

The 55-year-old former UC Berkeley mathematics instructor, who spent half his life as a destitute hermit in the backwoods of Montana, is accused of being the elusive serial bomber who was the focus of one of the longest manhunts in FBI history.

When the trial kicks off Wednesday, federal prosecutors hope to turn Kaczynski indirectly into their star witness. His handwritten journals and diaries will form the backbone of the case, they say, revealing a picture of a deliberate killer who for 18 years terrorized the nation.

In an outline of their case, prosecutors said they discovered a wealth of evidence inside Kaczynski’s tiny cabin on the Continental Divide, implicating him in the string of bombings. Among other things, they found a typewriter allegedly used to type all identifiable Unabomber correspondence since 1982, a handwritten autobiography indicating that Kaczynski intended to start killing people, and a fully functional bomb.

Death Penalty Could Be Focus

With the evidence seemingly stacked against Kaczynski, who has pleaded not guilty, legal observers suggest that the only real suspense will occur in the trial’s penalty phase. Will he get the death penalty? Or will appeals from Kaczynski’s younger brother spare his life?

It was David Kaczynski’s tip that led the FBI in April 1996 to arrest his older brother. But the anguished upstate New York social worker now finds himself waging a spirited campaign to keep his sibling from death row.

The evidence is expected to cast new light on the alleged Unabomber’s anti-technology views, the mystery of how he went undetected for years, and whether Kaczynski is as mentally ill as his family claims.

As the proceedings unfold, broader public policy issues will probably be broached, including the sloppy operation of the FBI forensic laboratory, airport security in the wake of the Unabomber’s threats to shut down Los Angeles International Airport in late June 1995, and the constitutionality of the federal death penalty statute.

Besides the Kaczynski family, the central protagonists will include his two chief attorneys, nationally known criminal defense lawyer Judy Clarke of Spokane, Wash., and longtime public defender Quin Denvir of Davis.

Opposing them as the lead government attorney is Robert Cleary, a special prosecutor out of Newark, N.J. The judge will be Garland E. Burrell Jr., who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and is the first African American to sit on the federal bench in Sacramento.

Watching it play out will be scores of reporters, authors and legal commentators from around the nation, prospecting for nuggets of information like the gold miners who rushed into this river city nearly 150 years ago searching for treasure.

Citing the extensive pretrial publicity, Denvir said last week that he is concerned it may be “hard to make sure that jurors don’t come in with a closed mind.”

Jury selection begins Wednesday. Jurors will be culled from a pool of 600 people from 23 Northern California counties, ranging from Stockton to the Oregon border. Jurors, whose identities will be kept secret, will be paid $40 a day plus $105 for “subsistence” if they live more than 80 miles away.

Kaczynski may mount a “mental defects” defense. Citing a paranoid schizophrenic condition, he may argue that he didn’t have the requisite mental state to commit the crimes.

Through hours of court wrangling focused on life and death issues, the bearded Kaczynski has rarely appeared in the courtroom. When he has been heard, it usually has been to register a complaint.

Living at the county jail in downtown Sacramento, he said the area around his cell was too noisy to sleep. In early September, he was moved to a federal prison in Pleasanton, 90 miles southwest of Sacramento, but has been moved back to Sacramento for his trial.

And last month, he balked at submitting to an examination by government-appointed psychiatrists. As a result, prosecutors are seeking to stop the defense from submitting testimony from Kaczynski’s own mental experts.

Charges Linked to 4 Bombings

Although prosecutors hope to tie Kaczynski to all the Unabomber explosions, he is facing charges in four bombings. They include two blasts a decade apart in which two Sacramento men, Hugh Scrutton and Gilbert Murray, died.

Shortly before noon on Dec. 11, 1985, Scrutton walked out of the back of his Sacramento computer store to take a break. He spotted an object in the parking lot.

Scrutton bent over to pick up what appeared to be a road hazard--a piece of wood with nails protruding. There was a roar. Scrutton, 38, was killed in the explosion.

Scrutton’s slaying--the first death attributed to the Unabomber--is described in a numeric code authorities say they found in Kaczynski’s cabin and decoded.

One journal entry reads: “The device was hidden inside a hollow piece of wood, so that when the wood were to be grabbed or picked up, the bolts in the trigger would come out. The device was deployed on Dec. 11, 1985.”

In their trial brief, prosecutors tie his comments to each of the four blasts for which he is charged.

On a day in April 1995, a package addressed to William Dennison, former president of the California Forestry Assn., arrived at the group’s Sacramento offices. It was just a few days after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Staffers talked about the strange package, even shook it before handing the shoebox-size parcel to Gilbert Murray, the association’s new president. When he opened it, the package exploded. Murray, 47, was killed.

In between the killings of Scrutton and Murray, Kaczynski is accused of having sent bombs in June 1993 that blew off the fingers of UC San Francisco geneticist Charles Epstein and injured the fingers and abdomen of Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter.

In April 1996, Kaczynski was arrested in Montana and two months later indicted in Sacramento on 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing and using explosive devices. The federal charges relate to bombs that were either mailed or exploded in Sacramento.

Separately, the Harvard University-educated bachelor has been charged in the December 1994 blast that killed advertising executive Thomas Mosser in his North Caldwell, N.J., home. That trial is on hold until the Sacramento prosecution is finished.

Last spring, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Kaczynski in connection with the slayings of Murray and Mosser.

The prosecution, based on its filings, intends to show that all “these bombings formed part of an 18-year scheme in which the onetime UC Berkeley mathematics professor mailed or placed 16 bombs in an effort, as Kaczynski himself phrased it, to ‘kill someone I hate’ and to gain ‘revenge on society.’ ”

“Throughout this scheme,” they contend, “Kaczynski sought to build increasingly lethal bombs by improving his bomb design and his bomb-making techniques. Kaczynski achieved success in his 11th bomb,” which resulted in Scrutton’s death.

Besides the three deaths, 23 people were injured in the blasts, including 12 aboard an airplane in 1979.

Identifying a Suspect

The bombing spree began a year earlier with a blast that caused minor injuries to a police officer in Chicago.

The case was dubbed “Unabom” because some of the early attacks were aimed at airlines and universities. At other times, authorities called the suspect the “junkyard bomber,” because it was believed that he was scrounging bomb parts at scrap yards.

The blasts that injured Epstein and Gelernter were the 13th and 14th attacks attributed to the Unabomber. Both devices were postmarked in Sacramento and broke a six-year silence by the Unabomber.

Prosecution documents quote from a letter dated April 20, 1995, to the New York Times in which the Unabomber declared:

“After a long period of experimentation we developed a type of bomb that does not require a pipe, but is set off by a detonating cap that consists of chlorate explosive packed into a piece of small diameter copper tubing. . . . We used the bombs of this type to blow up the genetic engineer Charles Epstein and the computer engineer David Gelernter.”

“A carbon copy of this letter was found in the defendant’s cabin,” prosecutors said in their trial brief.

The Unabomber also told the New York Times that he would “desist from terrorism” if the newspaper published his 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto.

At the urging of law enforcement officials, the New York Times and the Washington Post jointly published the deadly terrorist’s manuscript.

In the manifesto, the Unabomber argued that industrial and technological progress have been a “disaster” for the human race. “They have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering . . . have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”

After initially reading the manuscript, David Kaczynski said he dismissed the notion that his brother was the Unabomber. But as the months passed, he had misgivings.

“I told the FBI in mid-February [1996] that I had suspicions that he could be involved and hoped that he could be ruled out as the Unabomber,” David Kaczynski said in a sworn affidavit.

But his hopes were dashed.

Instead, David Kaczynski’s suggestion allowed the FBI--which had followed thousands of dead-ends--to focus on Theodore Kaczynski.

Ever since Theodore’s arrest, the Kaczynski family has argued that he was increasingly unstable and that his life should be spared.

“This case is all about whether he gets the death penalty,” said Laurie Levenson, associate dean of the Loyola University School of Law.

“They [defense lawyers] still have the ammunition to argue against the death penalty,” Levenson said. “Even without a formal mental defense, they can point out there’s something wrong with this guy.”