Unabomber

by Dave Shors

  In 1988, we took a short trip to Helena to shop. We arrived home to find one of our two-year-old malamutes lying in the yard, paralyzed. He died before we could do anything for him, a victim of poisoning.

  During 1988, we acquired a breeding pair of Shar-Peis, the wrinkly dogs from China bred as guard or fighting dogs. The first litter of puppies arrived the following summer. By this time all our dogs, including the more aggressive Chinese breed, were well aware of Ted’s habits and the places nearby he frequented, especially the trail above the old miners’ ditch where he crossed into the gulch.

  It wasn’t long before the dogs had worn a trail resembling a cow-path on that hillside just from running back and forth between our house and the old ditch and then along the ditch sniffing for Ted.

  We were forced to build kennels for the stud dogs because they were too aggressive, especially when a female would come into heat. But even when the males were locked up all day, the first thing they’d do when released would be to run up to the ditch to see if Ted had passed by that day. The young dogs learned from the older dogs and were quick to follow suit. If they caught his scent and followed it up the gulch, we knew he was around. If they ran up and right back we knew he hadn’t passed that day or he was staying up in the mountains for a while.

  I felt bad the dogs interrupted Ted’s solitude, but there was little that could be done. He knew why we had them. The dogs weren’t only for Betty’s protection, but also to help keep us from being vandalized or robbed, as many of our neighbors had been. At the time, I didn’t know my pity was ironic.

  The dogs continued to be the targets of mean-spirited acts. Quite often, one or more of them would limp home with cuts or deep rock bruises.

  And on occasion we’d have to scrub them thoroughly. Betty’s theory of who was plastering them with feces still didn’t make sense to me. I said to her: “Honey, I don’t have an answer for you, but I have a hard time believing people would drive all the way to Lincoln just to make our lives miserable by smearing our dogs in that way.”

  The next two dogs to meet their demise were both Shar-Peis, a male and a female. The two incidents occurred within the same year. After refusing to eat, they both died the same day they became sick, also victims of poisoning.

  One of the hardest losses for me to deal with was the death of our aging malamute, Tasha. Betty told me one summer afternoon Tasha had stopped eating and was lethargic. After going to the porch and checking her over, I told Betty there wasn’t anything wrong with her and attributed her lack of movement to the heat.

  Tasha’s condition deteriorated rapidly. I tried to hand-feed her roast beef, but she refused even that and just lay on her side with lungs working heavily in the summer heat. I stayed with her and comforted her. She tried to twist her head back and lick herself, so I checked the area and found a small string of loose hide where she was trying to clean.

  What I then saw made me extremely furious. There was a small-caliber bullet wound in the rectal area. It seemed someone had carefully shot Tasha with a .22 caliber sized bullet there, perhaps thinking the wound wouldn’t be noticed. She was bleeding internally, intestines pierced by the slug, and she was dying a slow and agonizing death.

  It was late that night before the wound was discovered, and I planned to take her to the vet first thing in the morning. But she didn’t make it through the night.

  Who was responsible? There were similarities between the ways Tasha and Jigger died. I blamed everyone possible except Ted. But I couldn’t find motive or proof that any neighbor or weekender had committed these acts. Everybody loved Tasha, and after quizzing each person who either lived close or visited on weekends I didn’t have an answer.

  Our dog population held steady for a time after we lost Tasha. We didn’t want to add any new pets until we could find out what was happening. A couple of years passed without any more losses. Everybody in the area, including Ted, knew how upset I was over Tasha and that I was keeping a close watch on our remaining pets. But with them running daily up to the ditch and along the trail they’d still have occasional run-ins with whoever was smearing them with human feces.

  Then during the early 1990s we lost four more dogs, all poisoned.

  In the spring of 1996 all the gruesome dog incidents stopped. Since that time we’ve never had any of our dogs plastered with human waste nor have we had any injured and die from strange wounds or poison.

  The heavily used dog trail that was so prominent leading up to the old miners’ ditch has now begun to grow over, barely noticeable. Our dogs have lost interest in running up there anymore.

  One summer day a few months after Ted’s arrest in 1996, neighbor Butch Gehring and I talked about our dogs while out hiking together. He said one of his dogs got violently ill, but he managed to get it to the vet for treatment in time. The vet examined the dog, took blood samples, and discovered it had been poisoned with strychnine. Even though the dog’s life was saved, its immune system was destroyed and up until its death it was never the same.

  As we talked about symptoms and how many of our dogs had died, I realized their deaths must have been caused by the same poison.

  Then something clicked in my mind, jarring loose a detail I hadn’t thought of for at least fifteen years. There was a small bag of strychnine-laced oats I brought home from a farm where I had done a lot of welding years ago. Strychnine wasn’t illegal at the time and there were many pack rats nesting in my equipment and chewing up and destroying fan belts, wiring, and hoses, so I placed a small dish of poisoned oats in each machine that fall.

  Other things took priority and I didn’t plant more of the poison. But a year or two later I went to the old van where the oats were stored, away from the house, and they were gone.

  I had removed the oats from their canvas bag because it was rotting, and then poured them into a plastic bottle and capped it securely. I didn’t want to spill any for fear squirrels or birds might eat them and be killed.

  I remember writing in bold letters on a piece of paper, “Poison—Strychnine Oats,” and taping it to the outside of the container.

  FROM FBI INVENTORY

  L-9—Black pepper can containing several metal pieces and a plastic bottle labelled “Strychnine Oats”

  It had been so long since I had even thought of those oats. As Butch listened to the story, I shuddered to think how easy it would have been for someone to prepare a lethal cocktail or a deadly snack of meat and oats to feed to an unsuspecting dog.

  Things were starting to make sense. Some answers were surfacing in the wake of Ted’s arrest. I still wondered how anyone could be so totally and remorselessly cruel.

  The Lincoln Mysteries

  Eighteen thousand pounds of Cat diesel power pulled a half-dozen eighty-foot lodgepole pine logs with a winch across the forest floor. It was early afternoon in a heavily timbered area just west of 6,376-foot Stemple Pass, and one of Montana’s major environmental controversies was being played out under the watchful eyes of Ted Kaczynski. Ted, perched across the way on Windy Point, seemed extremely interested in what was going on, watching the equipment and my crew hard at work.

  He had arrived about 10 A.M. and sat quietly in the trees as the 475-horsepower diesel came to life with a deep-throated roar and a cloud of black smoke. At full throttle it generated enough power to move a small house off its foundation and then crush it under its twenty-inch-wide steel tracks.

  It’s not a gentle machine, but this wasn’t gentle work.

  Montanans have struggled for decades over how best to manage their public land and its resources. Should the mature trees be harvested, milled, and cut into lumber, and then used to build homes in Helena, Billings, and all points east and west? Should this huge storehouse of natural resources provide wood to the rest of the world? To some, the price of harvesting is too great. To them logging crews can disrupt the natural scheme of things—everything from habitat to watershed—cutting roads and entire forests, leaving mountainside scars that last
a generation while the trees regenerate. To them, wilderness and protected areas managed for recreation preserve this land for future generations. To others, the future is now and the forest is a renewable resource. Logging provides important jobs and materials needed by people throughout the country. They say logging isn’t nearly as damaging as the natural cycles of fires, winds, and floods.

  That’s an oversimplification of an often passionate conflict. But on this particular day any dissatisfaction about my logging job had long ago been settled during public hearings conducted by the Forest Service, which had solicited and approved bids on the work at hand.

  It was 1985 and I had successfully bid on the very large Forest Service contract to log 4 million board feet of timber and build more than six miles of specified roads into a virtually roadless area near Stemple Pass just a few miles from my house.

  It was just one of the major changes taking place in the Stemple area around Ted and me at the time.

  I was excited to secure a contract for work so close to home, a job that would last at least four years. Meanwhile, my friend, and Ted’s neighbor, Butch Gehring, had purchased a sawmill and set it up just a few hundred yards from Ted’s cabin. I bought a sawmill a year earlier and had been cutting lumber for an addition at my home. My mill was a small one-man outfit; Butch’s was more of a production-size mill he planned to operate full time.

  One day not long after Butch had his mill up and running, he heard a different sound coming from the Allis-Chalmers diesel engine, which had been in excellent running order. He immediately shut down and tried to figure out what was causing the strange noise.

  He was startled and angry to find that a white, heavy, sandy material had been poured into the fuel system. He could feel the sharp grit in the diesel fuel as he rubbed it between his finger and thumb.

  Later, as we had a long talk about what had happened, he described the material and said he was thankful the engine hadn’t been destroyed. He asked what I thought it might be; he was sure it wasn’t sugar.

  I told him that I’d bet anything it was white crystalline barite. I immediately thought of barite when Butch described the sand as being very dense and heavy and that it resembled sugar, but was coarser.

  Barite is uncommon around Lincoln and I told him I know of only one place where it can be found—in my gulch.

  White barite sand has settled to bedrock along with black sand and garnet sand we usually see when looking for gold. Barite is easily mistaken for quartz except for the obvious weight difference. With a high specific gravity, its heft feels more like lead than quartz. Its density and heaviness allow low-grade barite to be used as drilling mud for oil rigs, because it will travel downward easily. Higher grades are used in manufacturing paint and glass. If ground up and introduced into an engine, the results would be disastrous.

  Butch was furious, and we talked about who might have done it. Right away he suspected Ted. Butch said he and Ted didn’t always see eye to eye, and he felt Ted had a motive, and he didn’t trust Ted.

  I agreed there was motive—Ted surely didn’t like having the sawmill and its noise so close to home he could hear it all day—but I still didn’t think he would sabotage the mill. As a neighbor he wouldn’t want to draw attention to himself.

  I reminded Butch that if the substance was ground barite, it would greatly limit the number of potential suspects because the person would have to know where to find it and also have a good knowledge of minerals. Unfortunately, Butch had thrown the gritty fuel away, so nothing more could be done.

  As the summer passed, I completed the first two miles of road on my job and started logging. I added several new pieces of equipment to my fleet: a Kenworth truck with a lowboy trailer, another crawler dozer to skid logs, and a motor grader to blade roads.

  I started to see Ted frequently while I was working. I’d see him sitting on an opposite hill scrutinizing our work, but I didn’t think much of it, assuming he was curious about the various kinds of equipment and how it was used in logging.

  I even gave him a ride home from the job site one afternoon and he didn’t say anything derogatory. At one time I had considered offering Ted a job, but I remembered Butch telling me how Ted had walked off the job after just a few hours. Since I was working on a tight contract schedule I decided not to risk it, not wanting to break in a new man who might quit right away. Also, I didn’t want to chance a potential work conflict with Ted that might even strain our friendship.

  The changing of the seasons is subtle in a lodgepole forest without deciduous reminders. As summer turns to fall, first you’ll notice the shorter days, then how quickly the high mountain air chills as the sun sets. I planned to log all winter, so when I heard the first bull elk bugling in search of mates, I knew it was about time to prepare my line skidding machine with the large drums spooled with hundreds of feet of steel cable. I’d attach the cable to logs and skid them uphill across the snow to a landing where they could be loaded and hauled to the sawmill.

  I saw Ted much less during the winter months that year, but he’d still show up once in a while to watch our work. That winter I completed the first three logging units within the first mile of road built the previous summer. Each logging unit contained about 200,000 board feet of lumber, enough raw material to build a small subdivision.

  Spring was especially welcome since my crew and I had worked many days in the -10° F. and -20° range; other days were so much colder we weren’t able to work at all. It was a winter of heavy snow, making it difficult to keep the roads open. After the spring thaw in 1986 I went back to road building and completed the first three- to four-mile stretch. Then I moved my equipment to the next site to begin building the last road required by the agreement, a three-mile jaunt into a roadless area virtually next to the Continental Divide Trail.

  That summer another local Forest Service contract was awarded and it included a short, one-mile road to be built between my road and the top of Stemple Pass. I had declined to bid on this much smaller job, knowing I already had my hands full with nearly 3 million board feet yet to log on both roads.

  After that contract was awarded, the successful bidders asked me to help with their road construction. Since things were moving pretty smoothly on my job, I consented and did all of the road grading for them.

  Gates were installed on all of these roads, per contract requirement, and I was glad, considering all the recent acts of vandalism in the Stemple area. So far I had been lucky, with only one incident where people cut firewood out of my log decks, ruining the lengths and costing me about $1,000. It could have been much worse.

  I was thankful none of my machines had been hit, especially after learning that a state-owned motor grader parked near Lincoln had been badly damaged. Its hydraulic hoses had been chopped up and its windows and gauges had been broken, along with other damage.

  As lucky as I felt, I began to wonder who would be next and hoped it wouldn’t be me. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  Actually, I had been feeling much safer since we were working more than a mile from the main Stemple Road. Far behind my locked gate, we were totally out of sight.

  Then one morning while I was working on the upper road, a crew member who had been skidding below with one of my Cats drove up in his pickup. He stepped out and approached with a stern look on his face. As he neared, a large lump stuck in the pit of my stomach and a sick feeling came over me.

  He said I needed to come down to the Cat to check it out. It had lost engine oil pressure and he was lucky to get the machine back to the road.

  The first thing I noticed at the Cat was some equipment was missing, including shovels, a fire extinguisher, and other fire suppression tools required on every machine. My operator said the items had been gone when he came to work.

  Surely, whoever took the equipment had tampered with the engine. My apprehension turned to extreme anger and I swore I would break every bone in the body of whoever was responsible. All I had to do was catch
him.

  The engine had been nearly destroyed; the rods, crankshaft, and most other moving parts were ruined. When I finished repairing the Cat, the parts bill exceeded $13,000, and if that wasn’t enough, the down time cost me even more.

  This was the work of someone who knew the Cat was back there. My confidence in having my equipment parked out of sight, far off the main road and behind a locked gate, had been misplaced. The site had made it more private for the criminal to accomplish his dirty work.

  What was sobering and frightening was that the person was becoming even craftier. My operator informed me he had checked his machine carefully as always. I knew he had; he’d been working for me for some time and we had a routine we followed before start-up.

  While overhauling the engine, I examined it carefully and discovered the perpetrator had cleverly poured an abrasive down the dipstick hole, thus bypassing all protective filters. The abrasive, upon close scrutiny, appeared to be a fine, heavy, white sand.

  I remembered Butch’s episode the year before. Instead of answers, this only prompted more questions. I still couldn’t put things together since I was thinking the material used had to be coming from somewhere else, somewhere far away.

  But was it? Or was I just too blind to see what was becoming more and more obvious? It couldn’t be Ted, the friend I totally trusted?

  Lincoln, usually a peaceful mountain community, first started to develop a much darker edge during the second half of the 1970s. No one could really explain the curious and often dangerous events, but some strange new force was in the air.

  My first brush with the unexplained had occurred in 1975. My younger sister, Anne, and I planned a camping trip for just the two of us prior to her marriage that year. I took her to one of my favorite camping spots about a mile up McClellan Gulch to spend her last weekend as a single young woman. We felt it would be a perfect opportunity to talk about her life, and for me, as her older brother, to give her the best advice I could about her future.