It was
May 25th 1978, Terry Marker was on his usual patrol on
campus at the
University of Illinois. This earmark
package, addressed to an
engineering
professor at Rensselaer from a material science professor at
Northwestern, was
found in a parking lot. What seemed like
an insignificant
misplaced parcel
was about to start a reign of terror and the longest manhunt
in U.S.
history. Officer Marker retrieved the
package and began to open it;
the crude
triggering mechanism set off the device.
A flash of fire and smoke
spewed towards
Terry's face as the match heads ignited and the mystery
package
exploded. This event sparked the
"most expensive manhunt in
United States
history, ultimately costing upward to $50 million" (Douglas,
31). The reasoning behind this initial attack (and
subsequent assaults) was
not known for
sure until 15 years later in 1993, when the Unabomber's anti-
technology
philosophy became public.
The Unabomber's 18 year tirade against
technology killed three people
and maimed 23
others in a series of 16 attacks dating back to 1978. The
Unabomber's
targets were universities and airlines (thus the "un" and the
"a"
in the FBI's code
name); proponents of technology. The
Unabomber believes
that the present
industrial-technological society is "narrowing the sphere of
human
freedom" (Unabomber, 93).
The crudeness of the Unabomber's inaugural mail
bomb attack was not
an indication of
what was to come. The Unabomber's
devices became more
sophisticated and
deadly as his targets became more specific and focused.
"The
pressure vessels in his bombs were the most sophisticated ever seen by
federal
authorities" (Ewell, 3). His later
efforts were sometimes concealed in
books and
hand-carved boxes, had all hancrafted parts carved of wood and
metal (he made
his own pins, screws and switches), and sometimes had
altimeter and
barometric switches which would activate at precise altitudes in
an airplane. Bombs, like the one planted outside of a
computer store in
Sacramento, were
sometimes fitted with gravity triggers which would
detonate the bomb
at the slightest touch. Later bombs
contained two
independent
systems of batteries and wires, a backup fail-safe mechanism,
installed to
ensure the bombs detonation. The crime
scene analyses
suggested that
each bomb "took more than a hundred hours to construct"
(Douglas, 56).
The bombs were getting deadlier as the
Unabomber's skill level
evolved. FBI agent James Fox says "This guy's
done a wonderful job in self-
education
(Gleick, 26). On April 24, 1995, Gilbert
Murray, president of the
California
Forestry Association, died instantly when a bomb exploded in his
office in Sacramento. The force of the blast was so great that it
pushed nails
partly out of the
walls in other offices in the building.
The force of the
explosion was so
great that the pieces of Murray's body; when retrieved,
filled eleven
bags. Evidence was presented to the coroner in paint cans.
Some bombs like
the one that killed Hugh Sutton, a computer store owner,
was filled with
pieces of nails to maximize the devastation to the victim. He
also became more
devious by targeting either the person to whom the
package was sent
or the person who supposedly sent it. If
the package didn't
make it to its
intended victim it would be sent back to an alternate one.
The Unabomber left very few clues at the crime
scenes. He was a
meticulous
criminal, "these components bear markings of having been taken
apart and put
back together repeatedly" said Chris Ronay, the FBI's top bomb
expert in the
1980's (Anez, 2 ). All addresses were
typed on an arcane
typewriter to
confound handwriting analyses. He hand
crafted most of the
parts that made
up his bombs because of the possibility of tracing store
bought parts back
to a hardware store or electronics store.
He made his own
chemicals out of
commonly available chemicals. He made
his own switches
that he could have
bought at Radio Shack. He spent hours whittling, cutting,
and filing metal
and wood to remove any hints of their origin.
He would
repeatedly sand
down all the wooden parts to his devices to remove any
possible
fingerprints and make the boxes that encased his bombs look store
bought. The FBI Crime Lab originally nicknamed him
the "Junkyard
Bomber"
because the internal parts were constructed of leftover materials
such as furniture
pieces , plumbing pipes, and sinktraps.
Across the continent, hundreds of FBI agents
were pursuing the
Unabomber. They have deployed some of the worlds most
powerful
computers. Task Force members crunched and recrunched
scraps of data
through a
"massive parallel-processing computer borrowed from the
Pentagon", sifting
though school lists, drivers license registries, lists of people
who checked
certain books out of libraries in California and the Mid West
(Gibbs, 31). The super-computers kept tract of the
enormous data base that
the FBI had kept
on possible suspects. The computers
searched criminal
records and
personal histories of thousands of suspects.
When the FBI got a
new clue or hunch
they would process it through the computers and see what
came up and who
matched the latest profiles. They have
enlisted the sharpest
crime-fighting
minds. The Unabomb Task force was a
multiagency team
comprised of the
top experts from the FBI, ATF, local police departments
where the crimes
took place, and from the Office of the Postal Inspector.
And they have chased
down 20,000 tips, gone door to door to
machine shops
and scrap yards,
and interviewed thousands of suspects since the initial
bombing at the
University of Illinois.
The Unabomber had kept investigators busy with
a seemingly endless
list of obvious
and subtle clues to his identity. The
first written clue being a
message found
from a bomb planted at Berkeley stating "Wu- It works! I told
you it
would-R.V." Wu and R.V. are most
likely professors at Berkeley but
"whether
these clues really mean anything, or whether they are just the
bombers way of
toying with the law wont be known till he is caught" (Marx,
2). The following are clues to the identity of
the Unabomber:
WOOD
Wood is the most common theme in the clues to
finding the
Unabomber, from
its use as a material in the bombs to its appearance in the
names and
addresses of victims. Small twigs were
glued to a couple of the
devices
found. Some of the bombs were encased in
boxes hand crafted out
of hardwood. He polished and sometimes varnished his wood
pieces, but it
was clear, from
amateurish joints, that he is not a trained woodworker.
Bombs were
fashioned with 2 x 4's to look like a pile of debris. A bomb was
mailed to United
Airlines president Percy Wood, who lived in Lake forest.
One bomb was
packaged inside the novel "Ice Brothers" by Arbor House,
whose symbol is a
tree leaf. False return addresses have
included such places
as Ravenswood and
Forest Glen Road and from such people as Benjamin
Isaac Wood.
THE 9-DIGIT CODE
To authenticate his written communication the
Unabomber included a
nine-digit code
(550-25-4394) on all of his letters and manuscripts. Task
Force members
discovered that the number was a real Social Security number
for a small-time
career criminal from Northern California but determined he
had been in jail
at the time of some of the bombings. He
has since violated
parole and
vanished. Ironically, he had a tattoo
that read "PURE WOOD".
Possibly, the
Unabomber knew him or had met him before.
STAMPS
The Unabomber avoids taking his packages to the
post office and uses
a lot of stamps
instead. He didn't seem to lick the
stamps (that would leave
saliva traces),
at least in his more recent bombings, it is possible that he
licked the stamps
in earlier bombings. He usually used stamps featuring the
American Flag or
playwright Eugene O'Neil, author of the "The Ice Man
Cometh".
Nathan R
On a 1993 letter from the Unabomber,
authorities found the almost
imperceivable
impression of the words that may have been written on a piece
of paper written
on the letter. It said "Call Nathan
R Wed 7pm" and
prompted a
nationwide search for Nathan R.
Investigators used drivers
license records
and phone listings to find more than 10,000 Nathan R's.
They interviewed
them all, but found no answers. This was
more likely than
not a red-herring
placed by the Unabomber to tease and confuse the Task
force.
F.C.
These initials have been included in some way
in most of the bombs.
The initials were
scratched into most of his bombs. The
initials, also, were
spray-painted in
the vicinity of several of the bomb sites.
Authorities have
suggested that it
might stand for an obscene phase directed towards
computers; like
"F@%K Computers". The
Unabomber in a few of his letters
to newspapers
says its stands for "Freedom Club", the group he claims to be
responsible for
the bombs. At one point, a university
worker whose initials
were F.C. was
scrutinized because of his open contempt for computers and
technology, but
he was later cleared of suspicion (Taylor, A17).
EYEWITNESS
DESCRIPTION
"It was a face that taunted a
nation", a mysterious killer hidden by a
hood, disguised
in dark aviator glasses (Goldston, 1).
On February 20, 1987,
a woman notices a
shady looking character carrying a bag of wood and left it
outside a
computer store in Salt Lake City. The
bag of wood turned out to be
a bomb that
injured a store employee. Finally, a
face of sorts is put to a
name. The eyewitness account, might have done more
harm than good
though. Ted Kacyznski, the Unabomber suspect, is
actually ten years older
than the man
described outside of the computer store.
Kacyznski was a
suspect who was
in the Task Force's database; but, he was ignored because of
his age.
LETTERS
The letters written to several newspapers,
leaders in the field of
technology, and
college professors give some important clues to the
Unabomber's
identity. The Unabomber always refers to
himself as "we" but
FBI investigators
always believed that the bombings were a sole effort.
Through them we
find a man bitter towards academia and technology,
possibly an
ex-employee of one of the two fields. He
makes references to
certain books
like The Ancient Engineers.
For years, criminologists and the FBI's top
profilers had been conjuring
up an image of
the Unabomber. "As investigators
and profilers, we came to
know him through
his bombs and his written communications" (Douglas,
177). The initial bombings target suggested that he
grew up in Chicago,
moved to Salt
Lake City, and was residing in Northern California. The
bomber was
comfortable around universities, they believed, though he
seemed to harbor
a grudge against them because he possibly did not graduate
or excel. The bomber was thought to be a loner, who
shunned society.
Possibly,
suffering from a mental illness; chronic depression, and probably
was abused as a
child. He was thought to work blue
collar work most likely
dealing with
power tools. And he was thought to be in
his late thirties early
forties. Gregg McCrary a former FBI profiler says that
they tend "to be 80
percent accurate
in the profiles" (Ewell, 2). That
is far from an exact science
but it serves
well in screening potential suspects.
We find the suspect Ted Kaczynski remarkably
similar, except that he
is ten years
older than originally thought, did not work with power tools (due
to the fact that
there was no plumbing let alone electricity in his shack), was
raised by a
loving and supportive family, and he not only excelled in college
academically; he
went or get his doctorate and taught mathematics at
Berkeley. Other than the virtual bomb laboratory found
in Kaczynski's
shack, bottles of
anti-depressant medication were supposedly found. But
other than that
Kaczynski fits the profile of a loner, an underachiever and
extremely
intelligent perfectly. Dr. Michael
Rustigan, a criminologist at San
Francisco State
University calls the Unabomber "the most intellectual serial
killer that this
nation has ever known" (Kendall, 6).
The Unabomber's 18 year loathing of technology
and industrial society
had an enormous
affect on many lives in the United States.
The Unabomber
created chaos
with airlines, postal service, campus security, and put fear into
the hearts of
proponents of technology. During 1995,
security was doubled
at all major
airports, because of the Unabomber's threat to blow up an airliner
flying of Los
Angeles International Airport.
Passengers were required to
show photo
identification that matched their tickets, if not their baggage was
manually
searched. Priority mail using stamps
instead of postage meters, and
priority parcels
dropped into mail boxes instead of handed over the counter,
have been
separated from other items out of concern for safety. Suspect
items are flown
in all-cargo airplanes rather than the commercial airliners that
carry most
mail. "And even though a suspect
has been arrested in the string
of Unabomber
attacks, no changes are planned in the handling of parcels"
(Schmid, 1). Campus security was stepped up. Many universities like
Stanford, bought
its own X-ray machine and sent its police force for
schooling in the
Army bomb-detection center. At Berkeley,
professors were
told not to leave
bags of refuse laying around, because it could provide cover
for an explosive
device (Gomes, 1). Computer and
technology businesses in
Silicon Valley
tried to keep the names of its employees out of
newspapers/press
reports and tried to maintain the confidentiality of workers'
addresses.
The almost two decade search for the Unabomber
yielded very little
clues. The US government posted a $1 million reward
for leads that resulted
in the
apprehension of the Unabomber and maintained a task force hot line
(1-800-701-BOMB). More than 20,000 were phoned in but the
Unabomb
task force was
still left very little evidence.
In June of 1995, the Unabomber's manifesto
entitled "Industrial
Society and its
Future" was received by the New York Times and the
Washington
Post. The letter, that accompanied the
35,000 word document,
demanded that
national newspapers publish his diatribe against technology.
He threatened to
send another bomb "with intent to kill" if his document was
not published in
its entirety. (New York Times Letter, April 24, 1995). The
Unabomber pledged
to end his campaign of terrorism once his thoughts were
published. FBI officials, who urged the newspapers to
publish the manifesto,
hoped that
someone reading it would recognize the author through his words.
The FBI spent
much of the next year publicizing the Unabomber's writings
(USA Today
11/13/96, 6). They hand delivered
hundreds of copies of his
writings to
university professor and leaders in the field of technology in the
hope that someone
would recognize his work.
The FBI also used the Internet to aid in their
efforts to capture the
Unabomber. The FBI's Unabomber web page included links
to the
manifesto,
warnings of what to look for in suspicious packages, and an email
address
(unabomb@fbi.gov) to contact with information.
The following is
taken from a
letter by Dr. William L. Tafoya, of the Unabomb Task Force,
explaining the
appeal to the Internet community:
The purpose for submitting the information on
the Internet is two-fold.
First, the Internet is another medium that
enables us to reach as wide
an audience as possible; to "spread the
word". Second, Internet users
are precisely the type of individuals that to
date have been recipients
of explosive devices attributed to Unabomb;
scholars and researchers.
The FBI plan was to make the Unabomber's
writings accessible in the
hopes that some
professor, some family member, someone who knew the
killer would hear
the "echoes of a friend or student or relative" (Gibbs, 16).
The FBI may have
been right. Kaczynski's brother, David,
recognized the
similarity
between his brother's writings and the Unabomber's anti-
technology tract
published in the Washington Post. In his
anti-technology
manifesto, the
Unabomber dismisses the Internet as a
futile way to
communicate. But, it was on the Internet that David
Kaczynski read
selections of the
manifesto that convinced him that his brother might be the
Unabomber
(Kovaleski, A03).
With the tip from David, all of the pieces
seemed to fall into place.
That is when the
FBI's high-tech two week stakeout began.
The FBI's elite
Hostage rescue
team was immediately called in. They are
experienced in
survival training
and can live for long periods in the wild; agents were
prepared to live
outdoors in subzero temperatures. They
employed infrared
and satellite
surveillance of Kaczynski's meager home (Douglas, 108).
Finally after
getting a warrant to search Kaczynski's cabin, agents posing as
Forest Service
employees arrested the Unabomber suspect.
Federal investigators arrived at Kaczynski's
dark, tiny cabin with some
of the most
sophisticated technology ever developed to detect and defuse
bombs. Looking for evidence that Kaczynski was the
anti-technology
Unabomber, the
FBI and the ATF brought in such devices as a remote-
controlled robot
and portable X-ray equipment to help search for bombs and
booby traps. They came with new scientific techniques
specifically designed
during the Unabomber
investigation to detect, analyze and defuse bombs
made in the
unique hand-crafted style of the elusive serial bomber.
"Technology
was developed just for this case because of the way he made his
bombs"
(Paddock, 23). With the detailed preparation,
new detection methods
and painstaking
search, agents were able to discover and preserve one of the
most crucial
pieces of evidence in the case: a completed bomb that was ready
for mailing. Given that the hunt for the Unabomber is one
of the FBI's
highest
priorities, the agency would be sure to use every technique at its
command to carry
out the search.
Before entering the cabin, FBI agents bombarded
the small structure
with
electro-magnetic energy to create a picture of its entire contents, much
like an
X-ray. This gave the FBI a
three-dimensional view of the landscape
of the room
(Paddock, 24). Also before entering,
agents inserted highly
sensitive
acoustic devices to sort out all of the sounds in the cabin and
determine whether
there were any electronically operated booby traps,
because these
devices make their own noise. One of the
most important
techniques used
in the search was the use of highly sophisticated chemical
sensors that can
detect possible bomb components. Such
"sniffers" can test
for small amounts
of a chemical in the air. Much of the
high-tech equipment
used by law
enforcement in such searches was developed during the drug war
for entering
booby trapped lairs of suspected drug dealers.
When suspicious
material was
located in Kaczynski's cabin, for example, the FBI used a robot
to enter the
structure and retrieve it. Agents feared
it could have been set off
if it was picked
up. Once items were removed from the
cabin, they were
moved to a work
area outside the house where they were X-rayed on a
portable machine
much like the ones used at airports.
After the cabin was
deemed safe, the
of the physical evidence was collected, bagged, and tagged.
This slow and
meticulous process lasted almost a month.
The Unabomber case is set for November 12,
1997. Kaczynski's
defense lawyer
needs the year to review the tons of damning physical
evidence that was
collected. The bulk of the prosecution's
case can rest on
the physical
evidence itself, and it appears that in this case there will be a
mountain of it,
including the documents found on the subject's premises, the
equipment he had,
the notebooks, the partially completed bombs, and the
writings that
describe bomb making. The prosecution
will bring in
explosives
experts to match up the bomb-making signature with the remnants
of devices
recovered from the crime scenes (Douglas, 149).
A typewriter
analysis will
also be implemented to see if the typewriters found at the cabin
match the printed
documents like the letters and the manifesto.
DNA tests
will be done to
try to match the saliva remnants on stamps to Kaczynski's
own DNA. Tools like wire cutters, wood files, and
drill bits; that leave
trademark almost
fingerprint like markings, will be analyzed and compared to
similar marks on
bomb remnants. The prosecution will also
try to trace
Kaczynski's past
to correlate it with Unabomber attacks.
The outcome of the
trial will be
based on how much of the physical evidence found at
Kaczynski's home
matches up with the Unabomber's physical evidence. The
pending trial
will prove to be very interesting to say the least.
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