by Dave Shors
Finally on Wednesday, the postman delivered a long tube that contained the rolled-up photo-map. It was a beautiful, sharp, and very detailed photograph of the mountainous terrain between Lincoln and Stemple Pass, with every detail visible, from ridge and trail to the smallest little valley.
Dave’s note that accompanied it read:
Chris,
Well, here we go—hope this photo-map will help you spot Ted’s bed and breakfast. The scale is 1:24,000.
Dave
On Friday, May 2, I was home working on my notes right after lunch when Bobby Didriksen called and described what amounted to a disruptive morning at the Lincoln Post Office.
While he was picking up his letters, one of the postal workers pulled a package that resembled a mail bomb out of a large mail bag. It wasn’t only its weight and composition that made them immediately suspicious, but also to whom it was addressed.
I decided to drive into town and talk to Postmaster Don Pearson. When I got there one postal worker still was shaken and upset.
The heavy package had been mailed in a cardboard Priority Mail envelope, designed to carry a pound or two. But this one weighed in at a hefty eleven pounds, stuffed to the breaking point with a sandlike material. It was wrapped with a clear packaging tape to keep it from rupturing.
It was addressed to none other than Ted, with a return address from a fictitious relative in California.
Don said he suspected it was a hoax; Ted’s name was misspelled and the numerical address was not quite right. But he wasn’t going to take any chances. He called the Federal Postal Investigator and was told to turn it over to the postal inspector who would drive up from Great Falls, and not to anyone else, not even the FBI. Because it was mail related, the Postal Service had control of this investigation.
The package was then marked with a forwarding address, since Ted no longer lived in Lincoln, and was given unopened to the Postal Investigator when he arrived.
Don was mystified how eleven pounds could be squeezed into a Priority envelope and wondered what kind of material would have that weight-to-volume ratio.
I told him there were many ground compounds, some explosive, that would weigh that much. Magnetite and hematite (black sand) would easily do the job. He said he wanted to bring up an envelope sometime and have me demonstrate.
That afternoon I called Dave Weber and told him about the excitement at the post office. He said none of the agents had heard anything about the package.
On Sunday, May 4, I hiked back up to the secret cabin to check the snow and ice level. On the return trip I followed a circuitous route lower on the mountain.
Directly below the cabin Ted had cut a blaze at least fifteen or twenty years ago on the trunk of a lodgepole pine. The old trail mark provided a new clue that would prove invaluable in future excursions.
As might be expected, Ted marked his forest trails and routes in a non-traditional manner. Old-timers normally blazed both sides of a trunk and cut their marks conspicuously into the trees, usually within eyesight of the next blaze along a trail, so they and others could easily follow routes through heavily forested mountain terrain.
Ted, on the other hand, blazed only one side of the tree to mark the route in, unless it was a special juncture in the trail, like a cut-off point. He marked his trees very carefully, barely nicking the heartwood. His blazes were often spaced several hundred yards apart and couldn’t be seen from one another.
Ted traveled the blazed route below the cabin often and knew the general direction so he didn’t need many markers to keep him oriented on the criss-crossing game trails. Plus, the infrequent number and positioning of blazes would make it difficult for anyone else to follow the route. After a few trips Ted became familiar with his trails through the timber and didn’t need the blazes, which would gradually weather, turn gray, blend into the surroundings and almost disappear.
He took great care to disguise his trails and it took several hours to find all the blazes and flag his route into the secret cabin. The last blaze was located directly below the cabin. As I studied his system it dawned on me that he intentionally ended the trail with a blaze directly downhill of his destination. He knew that from the last marked tree he had to walk straight up the mountain’s sixty percent slope quite a distance and he’d arrive at the cabin site.
All these precautions would have been tedious and time-consuming for the average person, but Ted had plenty of time and his cryptic methods virtually ensured that nobody would be able to follow him or locate any of his secret mountain places.
When Dave Weber called the following day, Monday, May 5, he was excited about the discovery of the blazes. He indicated they might be a key that would help unlock some of the remaining puzzles. As we talked about their importance, he started to share information about sketches Ted had drawn in his journals, including diagrams of secret caches and camps, marked only by vague points of reference like rocks, trees, streams, and tree blazes.
The agents knew the sketches were important maps and they had spent much of the previous summer trying to interpret them, but Ted delineated the maps in such a way that the caches and camps could have been located anywhere in the sea of trees surrounding Lincoln.
It would take someone with an intimate knowledge of the surroundings to break the code and find the areas that were mapped and described so generically.
Ted had an enormous advantage: he knew the general area being mapped so he didn’t need to describe distinguishable features like mountains or streams.
But I knew the country as well as or better than Ted.
Dave also talked about a trip he took back to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where all the Unabomber evidence was being stored, so he could study every note, map and description and possibly find a mark, a star, or any other small dot that would indicate where Ted had built his secret cabin.
He found no such mark.
I knew the cabin and the evidence inside were important in the government’s case against Ted, but there had to be something more involved to trigger such a huge expenditure of manpower and money.
Dave acknowledged the Feds were concerned about public safety: Ted’s bragging about setting a booby-trap out in the woods.
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
Summer ’77 I set a booby-trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where because if this paper is ever found the trap might be harmlessly removed.
But it probably doesn’t have more than maybe a 1 in 5 chance of killing or seriously injuring someone.
FBI agents admitted later this journal entry, along with others about the secret cabin and what might be hidden in or around it, prompted their intensive search. Dave said their instruction from the top was, “You will find it.”
I asked Dave if he’d send me copies of Ted’s cryptic little drawings to help with my continuing search.
He said he couldn’t, but he’d bring them when he returned to Lincoln. His need for caution was apparent. Dave said we had to keep our conversations confidential.
He also had a sense of urgency. He was afraid if we didn’t find and gather these exhibits soon there might not be enough time to have them examined and entered as evidence by trial time in the fall.
It was astounding that such a high-profile case didn’t warrant more expediency. There were other inner workings of the federal agency that were confusing and seemed counterproductive.
Dave had shared his disappointment and disgust that the agents in charge wouldn’t allow him to come to Lincoln alone so we could start examining evidence found in the secret cabin.
As he sarcastically put it, “God forbid that we should find anything without them.”
It didn’t seem that professional pride, jealousy, and personal egos should have anything to do with this or any other investigation. He agreed, but admitted there wasn’t anything he could do.
Dave was aware that if it wasn’t for him the prosecution might not even know about the secret cabin’s
discovery, because they had repeatedly ignored my offers to help. At one point I had even considered letting them find out about my discovery from the press along with everyone else.
He was the one who had taken the time to build our relationship and had gone out of his way to enlist my help, realizing the enormous disadvantage they faced in working in an unfamiliar environment.
I was sure I could understand Ted’s coded diagrams and find the secret locations plotted in the drawings if given a chance.
Dave said he was trying to put a team together for June 1 and asked if that would work. He and Max Noel were worried about invading our privacy and didn’t want to bring too many people along.
As we hung up it was apparent Dave was ready and eager to leave California and come to Lincoln, but everyone involved with the case wanted to get in on the action; they didn’t want to miss the first trip to the secret cabin. At one point, they said if they couldn’t go, then neither could he, which seemed petty. While Dave was concerned with the integrity and deterioration of key evidence, other members of the Task Force seemed worried about missing out.
Later that day, Betty and I hiked to an old mine adit about three fourths of a mile up the gulch, thinking Ted might have used it as a cache site.
Several years earlier the portal to the mine had been nearly closed off by small rock slides, but there had been just enough space to squeeze into the tunnel. Ted was such a packrat, hiding things everywhere, that there was a good chance he had things stashed away inside.
His blaze line to the secret cabin was close by and the old mine site couldn’t be seen from the double-tracked and seldom-used road that ran up the gulch. It was a perfect hiding place that I hadn’t explored for probably two decades.
When we arrived at the old mine the opening had been recently covered by more slides of loose stones and gravel. I dug around by hand and finally enlarged the entrance just enough to squeeze through. But when I did, my body blocked the light and it was impossible to see past the first ten feet of the tunnel.
Betty didn’t like the sight of me wedged into a small opening in the side of the mountain with just my feet showing and she implored me to pull out and return later with rope and better lighting.
I’m not intimidated by close underground spaces, but at her urging I backed out.
We would return to that spot when FBI agents came to Lincoln to begin field investigations.
On Wednesday, May 7, Max called from San Francisco to see if the cabin photos were back so he could get copies. They hadn’t arrived yet, but they should show up any day, I said. The film had been sent to Seattle to avoid any possibility of a local film processor becoming curious about the secret cabin.
We then talked about some of the cabin contents, including the pairs of yellow latex gloves. Max said he would do some research on the gloves, so he wanted all the codes and sticker information from the packages.
Then he asked if there were any small steel ammo cans inside the cabin, which really made me wonder just what else the FBI expected to find hidden in the mountains.
None that I saw, I said, but they could be encased in the snow still inside the cabin.
That evening Betty and I hiked up the creek bottom about a mile and a half, and found the snow and ice were melting slowly.
It was almost impossible to concentrate on anything else during the next few days. Dave and Max had aroused my curiosity with hints of ammunition cans, secret cache locations, and maps from Ted’s journals.
Dave called Thursday morning, May 15, and said Max had received the single cabin picture I sent. Trained in his job to be perpetually suspicious, Max promptly took the photo to Dave’s office and asked if it was the same cabin Dave had seen a picture of.
“Yup, that’s it,” Dave replied.
We continued to have almost daily phone conversations and with each there was new information. It was like slowly turning the focus ring on a telephoto lens, changing the image from a total blur to one of enticing detail.
On Tuesday, June 3, I had finally received the photo reprints and mailed them to Dave, along with another set of maps, an initial list of cabin contents and the diagram of objects inside the cabin. I had called Dave the day before to inform him everything would be in the mail the next day.
Max called Wednesday and said he had determined the yellow latex gloves were purchased in Salt Lake City. The Skaggs Alpha Beta name wasn’t around long, he said, because the company sold out to a larger chain after being in business a short time. But the store’s brief period of operation and the purchase of the gloves coincided with a particular time when Ted was known to have been there.
Max said the original item numbers, bar-coding, and place of manufacture and sale were irrefutable, things Ted couldn’t explain away in court.
Dave and I continued to talk almost daily. During one of our conversations he told me the prosecution had built a scaled-down, but true-to-life model of Ted’s home cabin to use in the trial. The model had a side wall that could be removed to reveal everything inside, including Ted’s work bench, bed, wood box, stove, shelves, and storage areas, even the small attic. I wondered if they would build the same type of model for the secret cabin.
By mid-June the FBI team decided they couldn’t make it back to Lincoln until Monday, July 21. Max said it was the first day everybody could get away.
Several days later I suggested to Max that he should let Dave come up alone and get started with the investigation. He was irritated at the mere suggestion.
On June 24, I called Dave and told him another package was in the mail, including pictures of rock caves, campsites, firewood caches, and tree blazes located along some of Ted’s trails, along with a map pinpointing their locations in the gulch.
A week later Dave called and said the package had arrived. As we talked I could sense there was something he wanted to share, another mystery that hadn’t been solved. I had learned to read him pretty well and had become adept at paying attention to my intuition since the agents were always guarded about sharing facts.
So during the rest of that day I went back over my notes, looking for a clue to this newest mystery.
My 1996 journal entry caught my attention. The June 15 entry described a conversation with Butch when he had said the agents were looking for these clues: “Mentions cliffs, water dries up in the fall, rock slide, diagonal rock, herbs in vegetation, and that maybe firearms are involved.”
Firearms had to be the key. So the next evening when Dave called we started to talk about what the agents wanted to accomplish during their time in Lincoln.
In the middle of the conversation I said to Dave we needed to take time to recover Ted’s gun.
Dave said yes, most assuredly, then suddenly stopped, knowing he had been caught off guard. He told me to say nothing about the gun because it would get him into trouble. I assured him I wouldn’t.
He then went on to talk about the six guns Ted owned, including his homemade zip gun, and how all had been recovered except his 30-30 rifle.
Agents were sure Ted had used the weapon in a Lincoln-area shooting crime many years earlier. Even though the statute of limitations had expired, Ted was now the suspect and they were trying to close the books on that case.
Ted had written in his journals that he had at times placed his 30-30 rifle in a special container and hidden it out in the woods. So looking for that would be another part of our work when agents arrived.
I finished my last map, gathered a new batch of photographs and mailed them off on Monday, July 14. This would be my last correspondence with the FBI before they arrived in Lincoln on the following Monday.
Dave had managed a quick trip to the area on July 7 and 8 to interview a couple of vandalism victims who had owned cabins near Lincoln and to go flying with a government pilot to take aerial photographs of my gulch and the surrounding mountains. He never did touch ground in Lincoln, but I waved as they flew overhead.
On Sunday, July 20, Dave made one la
st telephone call to me, saying they would depart the following morning. He’d call me Monday evening to make plans for the next day.
The agenda was full and I looked forward to helping the agents, because they were strangers in a strange land. And we were getting a late start.
Caught in His Own Trap
Often described as a lonely hermit, Ted Kaczynski had a penchant for recording details of his life in journals and also in small spiral notebooks he always carried tucked in his shirt pocket. It was as if he were fulfilling a basic human need to communicate, to tell someone about his life’s deeds in succinct and descriptive handwritten notes, even if it were only himself.
As FBI agents and prosecutors read through the thousands of documents recovered in his Florence Gulch cabin, they knew those acknowledgments penned in his own hand would prove his undoing in a court of law if they could uncover corroborating evidence.
The journals were a dream for them, but had to be a nightmare for Ted. There would be little defense of his acts of terrorism, especially if prosecutors could link what he wrote to actual physical evidence and testimony from people who knew him.
Ted never intended to have his thoughts and writings fall into the hands of the enemy. According to federal agents, he had a detailed escape plan that included an incendiary bomb in his cabin loft to burn and destroy the structure and its contents at the first sign of trouble. He could trigger the demolition before he fled by pulling a cord that led from the device located by his bedside near the front door, behind which there was a rifle always loaded and ready for a quick escape.
From Florence Gulch, he could hike the short distance to McClellan Gulch and his secret cabin, which was a gateway to the rest of the world. There he could change clothes, cut his beard if he wanted, and grab food and ammunition from several nearby buried caches. Then, while investigators sorted through the burning remains of the home cabin, he could escape undetected into thousands of acres of wilderness through the rugged Rocky Mountains north into Canada.