Unabomber

by Dave Shors

  To Ted, privacy was more than something to enjoy; he had to have it. Privacy was essential and even his outdoor hidden camping spots were being discovered one by one.

  He still had one sure bet: my gulch. With me as the gatekeeper to thousands of solitary acres, my gulch was his one private haven—and he knew I would keep it so. He had permission to be there and could come and go, day or night, anytime he pleased. It seemed as though he couldn’t find privacy enough anywhere else, including at his home cabin.

  Another incident during the early 1990s was related to me by a friend who had ridden his motorcycle past Butch’s sawmill and up an old logging skid trail near Ted’s cabin.

  Ted heard him ride by and raced out cursing and screaming at him. Ted’s hair was long and wild; with no shirt on, he was covered with dirt, waving his arms wildly, severely admonishing my friend to leave and never return. Needless to say he made quite an impression on my friend, who said he would never ride up that way again.

  A puzzling chain of events occurred at the first old cabin in my gulch, a mile south of home, where Betty had found Ted that cold February day in 1987. The cabin, built in the 1930s, was constructed of planed lumber and covered with heavy, black tar paper. Other than its slightly larger size of 13 by 15 feet, this cabin was nearly a carbon copy of Ted’s home place, with a similar pitch to the roof, no eaves, the door on the same side, and three high windows. Even the stovepipe came through the roof in almost the exact location.

  Like Ted’s, this cabin never had electricity, running water or plumbing. Inside were a wood stove, low bedspring, table, and a food cabinet made from wood reinforced with angle iron and covered with sheet lead to prevent hungry mountain rodents from devouring its contents. Even though this cabin was close to my access trail up the gulch, the site is still very private.

  The cabin, unoccupied since the early mining years, is even located in a spot similar to Ted’s home cabin, close to a creek, and is set among conifers and deciduous trees in a small opening.

  I knew Ted not only passed by it frequently while hiking around but also he used the cabin once in a while. I didn’t care.

  But something strange was going on that I couldn’t quite pin down. Something was different. In retrospect, I believe the changes started during the late 1970s or early ‘80s when I first observed boards beginning to disappear from around the windows. Soon pieces of tar paper were vanishing from the outside of the cabin, exposing the lighter colored, unfaded wood beneath.

  I dismissed the matter, blaming the wind and weather. Even though I wasn’t in the habit of inspecting this old cabin, I did pay attention as things continued to disappear.

  The interior of the walls had been sheeted with plywood and the glue holding the plies together had long since decomposed, leaving sheets of single plies still attached to the walls. These plies started to disappear too.

  Again I thought the wind was to blame, but I wasn’t sure; I really didn’t have any other reason that made sense. The mystery deepened when I later noticed part of the food box missing; more than half of its angle iron and sheet lead were gone, and more tarpaper was missing from the back, which you wouldn’t see unless you walked behind.

  The next thing that disappeared was the bottom of one truss, a twelve-foot two-by-four that strapped the roof truss together. The two-by-four had been removed from one of the trusses near the back and wasn’t readily noticeable.

  My eyes had been drawn upward inside because I had at different times used this cabin to hang game while it aged before butchering. The blue-and-white nylon ropes I had always kept tied to one of these trusses to secure the game were gone as well.

  Then rows of nails were missing from along the outside cabin base on the side away from the door and the back.

  With my work heavy schedule, I once again was distracted and didn’t try to satisfy my curiosity. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  The cabin materials wouldn’t be the only things to mysteriously disappear out of my gulch.

  I finally completed my big Forest Service contract up near the top of Stemple Pass in 1990 after two extensions. I hated to see it end, a job that good so close to home. I had taken other contracts in between to prolong that job as long as possible. It is a real rarity to find logging and road construction jobs of that size just a few miles away from where you live. I had logged many millions of feet of timber all over the countryside, as far as sixty-five or seventy miles away.

  As the job wound down and the machinery was hauled home, I left one line machine down near Poorman Creek to do some more mining. I removed the logging rigging, replaced it with a bucket and used it as a dragline to dig placer gravel.

  I didn’t get much mining done that fall since I had to haul equipment to another logging job about ten miles west of Lincoln. After spending the winter there I was pleased to find out that severe winds had toppled trees on my old contract area near the top of Stemple Pass. After being awarded a new contract for a small salvage logging sale, I gladly returned to the old work site for a couple of months.

  Logging was starting to get tougher with the jobs not only fewer, but much farther away as well. I had decided years before I wouldn’t take any jobs that were too distant. I didn’t want to have to live in my camper. That situation might be okay, or it might even appeal to a single person, but not me. I was married and if I couldn’t eat at my own table and sleep in my own bed every night, I didn’t want the job. There was other work I could do.

  My father-in-law and I were very close and had been friends even before I was married to his daughter. Having spent a great deal of time mining during his seventy-six years, Leonard was my partner on every mining venture until his death in 1992.

  He enjoyed it as much as I did and even when we weren’t mining together he was nearly always with me, going together to the woods almost on a daily basis. He is still, to this day, greatly missed.

  When the high water dropped in the spring of 1991, we went down to the Northwest dragline that I had left near the creekside spot where we had worked some years before. We planned to do some more mining. This was one of my more secure machines, with all the cab’s doors and windows equipped with locks.

  As we approached the dragline I noticed that the door and window on the blind side, away from the road, had been severely cracked from being pried open. After unlocking the doors and entering the cab, I spotted a large rock lying on the floorboard.

  A sick feeling came over me, much like the one I experienced a few years earlier. What would I find? It appeared as though someone had started to pound on the engine parts with the rock when apparently he quit and ran off, unable to finish the destruction. Perhaps a vehicle coming along the road startled him.

  After a very close inspection I was grateful to find only broken windows, bent doors, and other minor damage.

  We decided to haul the dragline home. It wasn’t worth risking a whole machine just to do a little placer mining. The culprit had succeeded in shutting down our operation, as small as it was. It goes against my grain to give in, but I couldn’t sit up there every day and night just to catch someone, especially since I didn’t have a clue if or when he might return.

  The winter of ‘92 passed slowly. Without my late father-in-law, working in the woods seemed hollow. The magic was gone without him to share the labor. For years I had dreamed of the day when I’d be able to quit logging and road construction and take only smaller jobs I could handle alone, allowing more time for the mining Leonard and I both enjoyed so much.

  That spring I bought a screening plant and an additional conveyor to add gravel production to my businesses, since I would complete all the year’s construction and logging contracts within a thirty-day period. The time was right to cut back on the heavy and intense mountain work. It had been good to me, but it was a hard life and had taken a toll on my health.

  Betty and I spent many nights talking about our future before we decided I shouldn’t take any more large logging and road const
ruction contracts.

  After I wrapped up my last logging job, I hauled the heavy equipment home for the last time, excited about starting a scaled-down life. I screened gravel for driveways, septic systems, erosion-control rip-rap, and other uses. Once again, I was able to do a little placer mining.

  Ted continued to hike into my gulch on a regular basis but we spent less time talking, except for occasional greetings. I felt sorry for him because the peace and solitude he craved was almost impossible to find near his home cabin, where noise and development were escalating.

  You could sense that frustration in his appearance alone, reflected in a slow but sure decline from the early ‘90s on. He started to look thin and unhealthy, and I could tell he spent little if any time cleaning himself. He presented an eerie figure, appearing more and more like the forest animals, except they spend considerable energy preening and grooming themselves.

  In the summer of 1991, Robert Orr, manager of the Lincoln Telephone Company, and Betty’s brother, told me about Ted’s bitter complaints that the pay phones in town often “stole” his money. These pay phones were among the rare models that required you to dial the number before depositing the money, which was still only a dime. The instructions were clearly posted, but for some reason Ted just didn’t get it, and continually had problems making calls. Finally he wrote a formal letter of grievance to the Montana State Commerce Department’s Consumer Affairs Division.

  Ted became even more withdrawn, quieter, almost lethargic, as if his life was winding down. This continued right up until I last spoke to him about a month before his arrest.

  The longest conversations I had with Ted during 1993 took place at a couple of local yard sales, those small community melting pots where just about everyone digs through their neighbor’s junk to discover some little treasure.

  The first sale was held in late spring, May or June. My long-time neighbor, Roy Hall, had died. He had lived almost directly across from me along the Stemple Road since 1969. His widow, Leora, was preparing to sell the house and move closer to one of their sons in Oregon.

  Betty and I were there talking to Leora and other neighbors when Ted walked across the lawn and into the garage, and started to study almost every item on the sale tables.

  I tried to talk to him, but as usual he wouldn’t say much with other people around. A few minutes later I saw him walk outside to look at items in the yard so I followed and told him about some of the good buys I noticed.

  Ted showed me a cast iron fry pan he found for two dollars, which made him quite proud. I agreed it was a steal for the price. He moved to a table where the family’s old silverware lay in bundles, each containing about ten pieces for fifty cents.

  As he looked through the silverplate I showed him some nice and much newer stainless steel flatware for the same money. He said he really preferred the old silverplate and bought several bundles.

  I never would have thought of the silver again except for another yard sale encounter several weeks later in Lincoln. My wife, sister-in-law, and I stopped, and there was Ted again. Just the fact he was there didn’t intrigue me, but what he bought—another big bundle of old silverplate—was mystifying. He must have carried off at least thirty spoons and other utensils. Why did he need it?

  I wasn’t able to come up with an answer from Ted. I just scratched my head, knowing there must be a logical reason for his purchases. One thing I did know, Ted wasn’t entertaining large groups at dinner parties. Years later, I would learn that the Unabomber had a use for silverplate.

  FROM FBI INVENTORY

  MB157—One white plastic bag, containing one small, round, cardboard “Quaker Old Fashioned Oats” cannister, containing one aluminum foil envelope/pouch, containing “Flash Powder”; handwritten notations on top of cannister “Spoons” and “Ekp. [sic; experiment?] 220” (crossed through)

  That summer it rained almost daily, making work difficult. Fall brought the nicest weather we had experienced for months, and I was finally able to start placer mining, working gravel with my large washing plant to separate the gold from the loose material. The water washes away lighter gravel and smaller stones, leaving behind concentrates of heavier materials and the gold.

  I became involved in other projects so I left some of the concentrates in the plant until a later date when I could separate the finer gold, a time-consuming process, from the remaining gravel.

  An early winter cold spell froze the material containing the gold in the sluice box of the washing plant. I’d have to wait until spring. That didn’t really bother me because everything seemed secure behind my house and almost a mile from public access.

  A long hard Montana winter followed, the first where I wasn’t out plowing roads, logging, and trying to juggle contract work during the nicer days. Spring brought high water, which in turn slowed my return to gravel production as I waited for the swollen streams to flow back within their banks.

  One morning as I checked my gravel equipment, getting it ready for spring work, Betty walked up the gulch and returned with surprising news. She said someone had managed to sneak up the gulch and steal the concentrates from our washing plant, taking gravel, gold, everything, leaving the box swept clean.

  It was apparent my gulch wasn’t invulnerable anymore, and after a close inspection I found many other items missing; I had no idea how long some of them had been gone.

  From various storage sites, a mysterious combination of things had been stolen, including many with little value: yellow nylon ropes once used to tie up dogs; the top pipe of a collapsible plant-stand; four-inch aluminum vent pipe, two or three two-foot sections; an 8-by-12-foot blue tarp, various science magazines, including Scientific American and Omni; waterproof matches; a number of books, including a copy of The Blaster’s Handbook; maps that had been stored in a pickup; food items from our camper; a length of aluminum irrigation pipe; ammunition cans; and many other smaller things.

  I had been lax for many years. I didn’t even lock my house doors when I was gone. It was time to change my habits.

  Then I started to think about other missing objects and acts of vandalism that I had dismissed during the last twenty years. I remembered a pickup parked up Fields Gulch during the mid-’70s that was found with sugar in the gas tank; several snowmobiles and other vehicles that had suffered the same fate; hunting camps that had been torn up, the food stolen; and many other missing items that were reported to local deputies.

  Lincoln always has seemed like a proving ground for sheriff’s deputies, highway patrolmen, and other law enforcement officers. The turnover is high, with people transferring in and out quickly. This had to affect any continuing investigation into the Lincoln-area crimes. One officer would get a possible lead and then be transferred out, with his replacement left to start from the beginning.

  In looking back, the same dilemma plagued the Unabom Task Force. Investigations that cover a long time-span, whether they are cases of vandalism or bombings, can be the toughest ones to crack because of personnel turnover, especially when the criminal proves to be exceptionally sly and, most of all, private.

  Even though Ted and I didn’t visit as much, he was always around in the gulch and I noticed changes in his habits. In the mid-1990s, he became careless in leaving obvious tracks in the gulch, crossing wherever convenient instead of walking off main trails and jumping the creeks in hidden spots. In the past, I knew he tried to hide the amount of time he spent there, but I always knew when he was there and I didn’t care. Knowing how private he was I felt he was more comfortable that way, so I left it alone.

  I saw and spoke to Ted for the last time during the winter of 1996, near the end of February, not much more than a month before his arrest. It wasn’t far from where I had met him for the very first time.

  He was out on his bike for a quick afternoon ride to get groceries during a short break in a long siege of bitter, snowy weather. I was on my way to Lincoln and saw his tracks heading toward town.

  I picked u
p what I needed and on my way back spotted him about two and a half miles south of town. I pulled up alongside and asked if he wanted a ride.

  Ted was friendly, but said he didn’t have far to go and it would be too much trouble to unload his pack, put his bike into the truck and then reverse the process at his mailbox.

  I said okay, and asked him how he had been. After he replied “okay,” and “thanks,” I drove away.

  He was very thin and haggard. He was having a hard winter.

  As I look back at our last meeting in the shadows of the mountains so important to both of us, even knowing his crimes, I can’t help but have a sense of melancholy. His burdens must have been immense to be manifested with such violence.

  Our first and last meetings weren’t much different, even though almost twenty-five years separated them.

  The Arrest

  The winter of ‘96 was proving to be one of the toughest we’d seen in years. By early March, when the calendar promised spring wasn’t far away, more than 200 inches of snow had fallen in McClellan Gulch. Seven miles to the northwest, downtown Lincoln looked like a Siberian village with nearly three feet on the level and head-high snowbanks beside many roads and sidewalks.

  During a twenty-one-day stretch in January and February, the mercury in our thermometer, hanging just outside the front door on an aspen tree, never found the energy to climb above zero.

  The only short break, when the sun momentarily poked through the gray, soupy cloud-cover that clung to the sides of the mountains surrounding the Upper Blackfoot Valley, came that late-February afternoon when I had seenTed for the final time.

  No wonder he looked so weary, considering he had spent such a severe winter in his primitive cabin with only a small wood-burning stove for heat. On many bitter nights that winter, when our wood stoves were burning red hot, I had wondered if Ted might be huddled in his root cellar to keep warm; at least there the temperature would be a constant 40°.