by Dave Shors
The holiday season, then January and February, passed with little happening in the case. I was aware of the legal positioning behind the scenes as both sides prepared for Ted’s trial, but in Lincoln things had quieted down considerably.
But I was confident the FBI would return in the spring, knowing their field work hadn’t been a hundred percent successful. There were still many unanswered questions.
I turned to calendar watching, noting each passing day, and I found myself especially interested in weather reports and checking the snow level each evening. I busied myself with my piano students and preparation for their annual spring recital. But during their renditions of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” or Mozart’s “Sonata in C Major” it was hard not to let my thoughts drift back to the remote ledge and cabin.
Maybe there would be an early spring. But March came in like a lion with no spring thaw in the forecast. The first chinook winds, warming gusts that sweep down along the mountains, couldn’t break winter’s grip and we were destined to be locked in for at least another month.
It seemed as though I would never get back up there.
Betty was eager to go as well, and we often passed long winter evening hours speculating about what we might find and theorizing about the important role the cabin had played in Ted’s hidden agenda.
I had spent hundreds of hours trying to fit the pieces together and, slowly, Ted’s secret life both in and outside of Lincoln was beginning to show flashes of color. I had become obsessed with the case and had filled dozens of legal tablets with information obtained since the arrest—key items from my own experiences, the stories of my neighbors, and information from the media, the prosecution and defense teams.
One evening while poring over every detail listed in the “Unabom Chronology,” certain facts and dates started to look different, almost like an optical illusion that suddenly makes sense.
I was trying to link key details from the bombings and the chronology to certain situations in and around Lincoln. That winter I found five such correlations.
Chronologically, the first was that my journals noted that Ted had disappeared from the Lincoln area during the late spring of 1978, and was gone for at least a year. I didn’t see him anywhere and assumed he had moved away. He didn’t show up again until the summer of 1979. Now I learned that he had been in his home state of Illinois.
During this time, the Unabomber’s first and second bombs were mailed from the Chicago area. The first was found on May 25, 1978. A package turned up in the Engineering Department parking lot at the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois. It was addressed to an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
The package had a return address of a professor at Northwestern’s Technological Institute. The package was given to the addresser, who then turned it over to the Northwestern University Police Department because he had not sent the package. On May 26, the parcel was opened by a police officer who suffered minor injuries when the bomb detonated.
On May 9, 1979, a disguised explosive device, which had been left in a common area in Northwestern University’s Technological Institute, slightly injured a graduate student when he attempted to open the box and it exploded.
(After the first four bombs, the FBI organized the UNABOM task force, named for university and airline bomber.)
When I read that the Unabomber’s ninth device exploded at the University of California Berkeley on May 9, 1985, I recalled the third week of May that year. While driving my recently purchased Blazer home on Stemple Pass Road, I saw Ted hitchhiking and picked him up. It was the first and only time I ever saw him hitchhike. He didn’t know I was in the Blazer since he had never seen the vehicle. He was fresh off the bus, probably from Missoula, and was in a hurry to get home. He was carrying his small travel pack.
That bomb had detonated in a computer room at Cory Hall on the Berkeley campus. A graduate student in electrical engineering lost partial vision in his left eye and four fingers from his right hand. The device was believed to have been placed in the room several days prior to detonation.
Near the end of February 1987 my wife, while out walking with her dogs, surprised Ted where he was camped at one of our old cabins about a mile up the gulch. It was morning and very cold. His tracks in the snow came from up the mountain, from the direction of his secret cabin. His beard was short, all new growth. He wasn’t dressed for the weather and was on his way back to his home cabin.
The Unabomber’s twelfth device had exploded at CAAM’s Inc., a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 20, 1987. Disguised as a pile of nail-studded boards, it was left in a parking space at the rear entrance to CAAM’s. The bomb exploded and injured the store owner when he attempted to pick it up.
It should be noted that the Unabomber was spotted for the first and only time while in Salt Lake City. A woman saw him through a window at close range and a composite drawing was rendered from her description. He was clean shaven except for a mustache, was wearing wraparound sunglasses, a gray hooded sweatshirt and light blue denim pants like those found in the secret cabin.
Authorities later speculated that the sighting stopped the Unabomber activities for more than six years. Now I wondered if Betty’s encountering Ted on his way home increased his furtive behavior.
In late spring, May or June of 1993, I attended two yard and garage sales and Ted was at both, purchasing large quantities of old silverplate flatware.
On the twenty-second of June, a well known geneticist received a parcel at his Tiburon, California residence. It was postmarked June 18, 1993, and later was determined to have been mailed from Sacramento. The doctor attempted to open the package, which exploded, severely injuring him. It was the Unabomber’s thirteenth attack.
The fourteenth bomb was mailed from the same place on the same day, to the office of a Yale University professor and computer scientist. As he attempted to open it, the package exploded, severely injuring him.
It is significant these dates fall shortly after the yard sales. The explosive mixture in this later class of bomb included, along with other ingredients, metal powders—aluminum mostly, but silver as well.
The silver, added to the aluminum mixture, would have increased the power of the explosive, and would have made the aluminum impossible to track. It could also be added to the solder, rendering it untraceable.
The Unabomber’s first devices had been quite crude; matchheads were the main explosive. They were weak, because the matchheads would deflagrate (burn suddenly) instead of explode.
The second-generation bombs were better, but still weak. The main explosive ingredient was smokeless powder, obtained from various types of ammunition, including rifle and shotgun shells. This was an expensive way to obtain enough powder to produce a device. However, mixing the various types and brands of powder made the bombs impossible to trace.
The problem with a bomb of this type is that smokeless powder from ammunition also will deflagrate unless it’s packed just right, totally sealed and then detonated properly
As the years passed and Ted experimented in the mountains surrounding our homes and studied the near-deadly impact of the bombs detonated in his acts of terrorism, he learned how to boost the power of his devices, which became much more sophisticated.
His third-generation bombs were very powerful. Extremely explosive mixtures were combined with powdered metal, like aluminum and silver, to produce a combination that could produce lethal results when sealed in a pipe or similar structure and properly detonated.
The fourth and final generation of bombs was by far the deadliest. Ted had achieved a major breakthrough by eliminating the need for a pipe. Now he built a detonating cap from copper tubing, and placed it in an explosive mixture that was filled with shrapnel. These bombs were lighter, less bulky (so more easily concealed), and twice as lethal.
The devices used in the later attacks, including numbers thirteen and fourteen, were of this type.
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Common to all the devices was they were constructed from materials that were untraceable.
In the spring of 1993, I moved all my heavy equipment home for the last time. Much of it was set up about a mile above my house in McClellan Gulch where I planned to operate a gravel business.
That summer thousands of yards of gravel were dug from the old miners’ stone and gravel piles, washed and then screened for various construction projects.
With Kaczynski’s key, the FBI was able to transcribe the coded journal entries originally written in numerals.
Looking back, I can see how this activity within the confines of Ted’s sanctuary—namely my gulch and the surrounding country—would have had a disturbing impact on his psyche.
With each passing year, the world was closing in on him, choking his need for solitude. The activity around the gravel plant and the daily noise of machinery were things Ted could not tolerate. When the wind was right the grinding of rocks and gravel, along with engine sounds, could be heard far off in the valleys and mountains.
He faced a dilemma knowing he was unable to follow his normal recourse, which was to destroy any intrusive machines. Such a move would probably tip his hand.
I don’t believe he thought I was part of the evil empire intent on destroying the country. He had listened to me talk too many times about my love for the land surrounding Lincoln and how I would always preserve my gulch. Even the gravel operation was a form of reclamation, an attempt to smooth out and level the mining scars left almost a century before.
He must have realized that if he alienated me in a violent verbal confrontation over the use of the machinery he would most likely be banned from my gulch and the privacy of the place he loved so much. So I am now grateful for our friendship, even if it evolved into a friendship of necessity for Ted. He could have easily destroyed every one of my machines before I realized who was responsible.
Yet, knowing Ted, he probably plotted some type of retaliation.
While studying the dates of the bombings and related letters compiled by the FBI, I discovered an intriguing coincidence. Or was it Ted’s revenge? Starting in June 1993, a particular date appeared once, then again and again.
The date was June 24.
My mind flashed back to a conversation Ted and I had about my birthday back on June 24, 1980. I had given him a ride that day as I drove home to clean up for a birthday supper.
June 24 didn’t appear in his chronology until 1993, the same period I began work in my gulch on a larger scale. After 1993, the date appeared as follows:
Device #13, opened June 22, 1993. This device was mailed on the same date as Device #14, opened June 24, 1993;
New York Times letter, June 24, 1993. This letter was received by Warren Hoge, assistant managing editor for the Times;
San Francisco Chronicle letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was received by Jerry Roberts, editorial page editor;
New York Times letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was once again received by Hoge;
Washington Post letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was received by Michael Gretler, deputy managing editor;
Penthouse magazine letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was received by Bob Guccione, publisher;
Scientific American magazine letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was received by an unknown person working for the respected science magazine;
Dr. Tom Tyler letter, June 24, 1995. This letter was received with a copy of the Unabomber manifesto by Tyler, who was working in the Social Psychology Group, University of California, Berkeley. Another copy of the manifesto was mailed to Washington Post and The New York Times, also on June 24.
The June 24 coincidence continued when Ted floated a book proposal from prison. A story, published in the New York Daily News on June 24, 1998, and then picked up by The Associated Press announced “Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski is shopping for a book publisher from behind bars…Kaczynski’s handwritten, four-page pitch arrived at Simon & Schuster offices earlier this month.”
During the long winter of trying to figure out the enigma who I had thought was my friend, I began to wonder whether the recurring date was nothing more than a bizarre set of circumstances or maybe something more, a covert method of retaliation, a vendetta against me for violating his strict code of environmental ethics and also for disturbing his peace.
As March wore on the snow started to slowly recede, but bare ground was still weeks away.
Neither Butch nor I had heard from the FBI in months and I began to wonder just when they would contact me. Agents had come to Lincoln on Wednesday, March 5, but they didn’t take the time to talk to me.
I wanted to be patient, since I wasn’t sure how they would react to the cabin news anyway—maybe they’d get a search warrant and confiscate all my notes and the cabin. I also wanted to prove to the FBI that I could be trusted with new sensitive information. At least I could document and preserve the evidence before there was any further damage caused by the small animals or the weather.
I certainly didn’t want the press to catch wind of the cabin. A leak would cause a stampede of people and reporters either trying to pin me down or to sneak in and find the cabin site. The only people who knew about my discovery were Betty, Butch, and Bobby Didriksen. And I trusted them all implicitly.
Then finally, on March 26, I received a phone call from FBI agent Dave Weber, who was in Lincoln along with Max Noel and lead prosecuting attorney Robert Cleary. They were conducting pre-trial interviews with a few people who would be witnesses at Ted’s trial.
Dave asked if they could drive up and interview me that same afternoon. I said I’d be free until my piano lessons, which began at 3:30 P.M. Dave replied they’d arrive shortly after lunch.
I didn’t have time to run down to Butch’s and he didn’t answer his phone, so I wasn’t sure if he had talked to them already.
A short time later they pulled up into the yard, knocked at the door and—after getting all of our barking dogs outside—we moved inside and sat down in the living room.
This was my first meeting with Max, who had been the lead in many areas of the investigation and was a member of the Unabom Task Force.
Max talked about the beauty of the country; Dave and Bob Cleary were in agreement.
After more small talk, Bob Cleary asked the first question: When had I met Ted? Cleary asked most of the questions and it was obvious he was preparing the case in earnest.
For the first time I began to volunteer more detailed information than I had shared with anyone yet. I talked about the frequency and duration of Ted’s visits to my gulch and how much he loved it up there.
I then went on to explain the logistics and importance of not only the total privacy and Ted’s exclusive access, but the gulch itself and its strategic location and easy access to the Continental Divide trail and also to the rail line, which was only ten miles across the mountains. Walking that distance meant nothing to Ted. From the Divide, it was an easy and fairly level jaunt to side spurs and stops at Garrison Junction, Austin, or Mullan Pass where freight trains could be boarded easily.
I also told them details about Ted, his dress, the packs he used and the places he went.
Max asked me to describe one of Ted’s packs.
I said Ted always carried a large army green canvas pack when out in the mountains.
Max then asked if it had a frame.
I replied that it did, but Ted didn’t always use the frame.
He asked if the frame was wood or metal.
I realized he was quizzing me, not only to find out what details I might remember, but also to corroborate earlier interviews. I also felt he was testing me to see how I’d handle being questioned under pressure.
I described the frame of aluminum tubing—a metal frame—with braided white cord criss-crossed around the bottom. I apologized for adding the extra details, but Max said, “No, that’s great,” and commended me for being able to remember the details.
Cleary then wond
ered if I had talked to the defense team and if I had notes about what they had asked and when I had talked to them.
I said I had talked to the defense while Ted was still in Helena, but had adamantly refused to meet with the new defense team later in the fall when they asked for an interview. (Once the government set the first trial for Sacramento, the court appointed Sacramento-based public defenders for Ted.)
Cleary instantly lifted his head from his notes, looked straight at me and asked: “Why would you refuse to talk to the defense lawyers?”
I paused, but then told them in detail about what I felt was Ted’s scheme to discredit me—when Ted refused to see me at the jail and the letter I had received claiming I didn’t even know Ted.
They asked if they could have a copy of the letter, which I agreed to provide, and I also told them the names of the three who had sent me the letter. I said it felt like the whole mess was set up and once was enough.
They agreed.
Max said the woman who wrote the letter and signed it for the three had provided the defense with a sworn affidavit and then had tried to change details about her story, including how long she had known Ted, but a federal judge ruled what she said first was what she said. Max went on to say the letter I received, which contained information contrary to that in her affidavit, would help discredit her testimony.
I then saw her original affidavit, which stated she met Ted about four or five years after she started her current employment in Lincoln at the end of 1984. In her letter to me, dated July 8, 1996, she wrote she had known Ted for twelve years. The math just didn’t add up and I could see what the FBI was talking about.
I went on to tell Cleary and the other two about several other uncharacteristic incidents, including the time Ted was hitchhiking, and the winter day my wife caught him at the cabin behind our house.