Unabomber
Page 22
As we studied those jagged remains, Max brought up Ted’s strange aversion to breaking glass. He wondered if I had known about it, witnessed it, or heard Ted talk about it.
I replied no to all three parts of the question, but said he must have made exceptions when he was really mad.
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
I told him about all the windows Ted had broken out of the small, tin-covered cabin located in my gulch during the late seventies.
Even though I didn’t know at the time who had trashed the cabin, Dave had recently said Ted bragged in his own journal about being the culprit.
I said I had gone up the gulch right after the owner had found the cabin vandalized and had personally seen that every window had been shattered.
Max seemed surprised and looked over to Dave, who nodded in agreement, saying he had interviewed the owner of the cabin, who had told the same story.
Max said Ted must have been furious, because he had written often about his glass-breaking phobia.
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
Somebody used to have an oldish house-trailer parked at an abandoned mine up Fields Gulch; it seemed to be used only in hunting season. In Summer ‘75 I broke into this trailer by unscrewing some screws and prying off a metal window-frame, ruining it in the process. (I had a strong psychological inhibition against breaking the window, even though it’s very unlikely anyone could have been within earshot.) I stole a few cans of food from the trailer….(Next summer I noticed the trailer had been removed.)
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
Spring ’77 I went back to this same cabin [mentioned in an entry not quoted here]. There was a diesel earth-moving machine parked near it, and I sugared the fuel tank. Then I unscrewed a window from its frame (still that inhibition about breaking windows), entered the cabin, stole a trail axe, slashed the mattresses of 6 beds they had there, slashed a sofa, and poured out a 1/3-full bottle of vodka.
We continued the climb to Ted’s hunting camp.
Max kept saying, “We’ve come so far,” but I assured him the distance we had hiked that day was nothing more than a little nature walk for Ted. The country was huge and uninhabited; walks of several miles or more were mere jaunts.
Max thought we had gone too far, saying Ted wouldn’t camp so high up the mountain.
Just the opposite, I replied, saying we still had a way to go.
Max had a difficult time grasping a sense of scale in the mountains, even though he carried one of Ted’s hand-drawn maps that traced all the trails he had hiked over the years.
Seeing them on a map was one thing; following them on foot in the rugged terrain was quite another.
As my father-in-law had often said, “A mile is a long way in the woods.” I always agreed with him, knowing how true it was: the climbing, stepping over fallen logs, walking through slippery mud and rocks.
We topped the last incline and reached Ted’s hunting camp, one he had used often and had written about extensively.
Many bleached animal bones and pieces of firewood with the telltale chop marks from Ted’s ax were strewn about the area near the well-disguised firepit where he had cooked meals.
Dave thought perhaps the bones were from a winter kill or left over from a predatory attack, but those theories were quickly dispelled when they saw the distinct knife marks left as Ted stripped meat away from the bones with his hunting knife.
Dave thought it was interesting how Ted’s personality had changed since his arrest. While this had been his special place for many years, he had adapted to prison life well and was now in “heaven” playing the part of a jailhouse lawyer.
On top of it all—ordering every law book he could find to prepare his defense and making his lawyers follow his lead—he now required everyone to address him as Doctor Kaczynski.
Dave painted quite a graphic picture as he described the Doctor, with his head high, smiling and obviously in control, while a clique of “groupies” followed his every move.
I said the gullibility of people mystified me; it’s amazing how quickly a criminal is transformed into an icon, to be almost worshipped. It’s a given that criminals have rights, but what about the victims and their rights? Somehow I feel our nation’s sense of values has become skewed.
The agents both agreed, especially considering the many lives Ted shattered and destroyed.
What bothered me above any other thing then, and still bothers me now, is Ted’s total lack of remorse.
Max and Dave went on to tell me how Ted had written in his journals about some of the laws of men and how good they were for everybody else, but they didn’t apply to him.
While we were examining the bones lying around the campsite, I told them about the rabbit skull I had found at the secret cabin with a small caliber hole through it.
The conversation then shifted to our dogs that were brutally killed. They both shook their heads as I described the gruesome details of how our malamute, Tasha, had been shot by a .22 caliber in the rectal area and had bled to death internally. She was no doubt killed by Ted, using his .22 pistol or his homemade .22 zip gun.
Max said the zip gun was fairly sophisticated for a weapon that was made entirely by hand, but it was crude at best when compared to some of the machined but home-built guns commonly confiscated when the agents arrested street criminals.
Since they can’t be traced, home-built street weapons are made almost exclusively to commit crimes. Ted’s was no exception.
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
A few days ago I finished making a twenty-two caliber pistol. This took me a long time, for a year and a half, thereby preventing me from working on some other projects I would have liked to carry out. Gun works well and I get as much accuracy out of it as I’d expect for an inexperienced pistol shot like me. It is equipped with improvised silencer which does not work as well as I hoped. At a guess it cuts noise down to maybe one third. It is said that it is easy for a machinist to make guns, but of course I did not have machine tools, but only a few files, hacksaw blades, small vice, a rickety hand drill, etc. I took the barrel from an old pneumatic pistol. I made the other parts out of several metal pieces. Most of them come from the old abandoned cars near here. I needed to make the parts with enough precision but I made them well and I’m very satisfied. I want to use the gun as a homicide weapon.
My days in the woods with the agents weren’t without incident. Max soon discovered I was just as stubborn as he, and we argued more than once about things as simple as logistics and which end of a fallen log was the butt.
Every “discussion” ended with a laugh, though, and I knew both Dave and Max were having a good time, in spite of the seriousness of the whole matter. Our arguing was little more than stress relief. There was plenty of stress, considering all the loose ends and the trial looming just months away.
I could understand the tension felt by the whole prosecution team. Just sorting through approximately 22,000 pages of documents written by Ted and found in his home cabin would be daunting enough. Add to that all the physical and lab evidence documenting the past eighteen years and the task grew to epic proportions.
We finished scouting around Ted’s old camp and decided to move down and around the ridge to another area matching a description Max had given me from Ted’s notes.
As we climbed up and around one of the main forks of the creek, we neared the small cabin covered with sheet metal that Ted had bragged about trashing. His journal entries described how he broke out all the windows, stole things from inside and vandalized the small bulldozer parked nearby. He also stole the magneto from the Cat and buried it, although he didn’t describe where, so it was never found.
Dave and Max looked in awe at the sorry remains of the cabin Ted had vandalized nearly twenty years before. The ruins were a stark reminder of the severity of Ted’s rage when it was leveled on members of the industrial-technological society who irritated him.
The more I visited with Dave and Max, the more
we were able to resolve many of the Lincoln mysteries that had puzzled area residents during the past twenty-five years. The solutions were simple as they poured out of journals, where Ted bragged about most of the acts of destruction.
KACZYNSKI CRIME JOURNAL [A SEPARATE NOTEBOOK FOR “BRAGGING” ABOUT HIS CRIMES; SEE DESCRIPTION BELOW]
There is a small, functioning mine—I’ll call it Mine X for future reference—a few miles from my cabin, on the south side of the ridge that runs east from here. They had a large diesel engine mounted on the back of an old truck, apparently for running a large drill for boring holes in rock. In Summer ‘75 I put a small quantity of sugar in the fuel tank of the diesel engine and also in the gas tank of the truck. Sugar in the gas is supposed to severely damage an engine because it gets into the cylinders and acts as an abrasive. But I don’t know if this works in diesels (maybe sugar is soluble in gasoline but not in diesel fuel—or something).
…Summer ’76 I went back to Mine X and put a generous quantity of sugar in the fuel-tank of the diesel engine and the gas-tank of the truck.
…Still in Summer ’75, I went to the camp—apparently it is an outfitter’s camp—along the [name] trail east of the [name] drainage. They have a corral there, and, a little way back in the woods, a kind of lean-to with equipment stored in it. I stole an axe (this is the axe I still use), poked holes in several 5-gallon plastic water-containers, took the stovepipe and hid it off in the woods, smashed 2 thermometers, and scattered most of the other stuff around.
…Summer ’77 up [name], I shot a cow in the head with my .30-30, then got the [expletive] out of there. I mean a rancher’s cow, not an elk cow.
FBI TRANSCRIPTION FROM CODED JOURNAL [To further complicate his numerical code, Kazcinski used no apostrophes, created misspellings, and altered word breaks.]
SOME [EXPLETIVE] BUILT A VACATION HOUSE A FEW YEARS AGO ACROSS [NAME]… SO ONE NIGHT IN FALL I SNEAKED OVERTHERE, THOUGH THEY WERE HOME, AND STOLE THEIR CHAIN SAW, BURIED IT IN A SWAMP. THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH, SO COUPLE WEEKS LATER WHEN THEY HAD LEFT THE PLACE, I CHOPPED MY WAY INTO THEIR HOUSE, SMASHED UP INTERIOR PRETTY THOROUGHLY. IT WAS A REAL LUXURY PLACE. THEY ALSO HAD A MOBILE HOME THERE. I BROKE INTO THAT TOO, FOUND SILVERPAINTED MOTORSYCLE INSIDE, SMASHED IT UP WITH THEIR OWN AX. THEY HAD 4 SNOWMOBILES SITTING OUSTIDE. I THOROUGHLY SMASHED ENGINES OF THOSE WITH THE AX. THINK THEY WERE THE ONES I CUT CYCLE TRAIL AT [NAME], SINCE SILVERPAINTED CYCLE IS UNUSUAL. WEEK OR SO LATER, COPS CAME UP HERE AND ASKED ME IF I HAD SEEN ANYONE FOOLING AROUND WITH ANY BUILDINGS AROUND HERE. ALSO ASKED IF I HAD HAD ANY PROBLEMS WITH MOTORCYCLES. THIS LAST QUESTION SUGGESTS THAT THE TRUTH CROSSED THEIR MINDS. BUT PROBABLY THEY DID NOT SERIOUSLY SUSPECT ME, OTHERWISE THEIR QUESTIONING WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SO PERFUNCTORY. THIS WINTER (1982 TO 1983) VERY FEW SNOWMOBILES HAVE COME BY. I SUPPOSE EITHER THOSE [EXPLETIVE] HAVE NOT GOT MACHINES FIXED YET, OR HAVE REALIZED THAT THERE IS SOMEONE WHO WILL NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH TERRORIZING THE AREA. WHO SAYS CRIME DOESNT PAY? I FEEL VERY GOOD ABOUT THIS. IAM ALSO PLEASED THAT I WAS SO COOL AND COLLECTED IN ANSWERING COPS QUESTIONS.
Standing there with Dave and Max, I now understood why the FBI agents had been carrying a boat around these forested mountains the summer before. Dave said they’d been prepared to search “the swamp” where Ted said he had buried the chainsaw.
Dave now told about journal entries that described a hair-raising story of three young motorcycle riders who violated Ted’s code of not riding off-road.
As they playfully climbed the steep mountain trails, riding comfortably on top of their noisy two-stroke machines, they didn’t have a clue that their young lives were almost snuffed out on that bright summer day.
Ted, hiking nearby, saw them through the trees and was so enraged that he raised his rifle, leveled the sights on the first rider, took aim and prepared to fire. Then he paused momentarily and lamented that one of the riders might escape before he could kill them all.
That, coupled with the proximity of his home cabin and the intensive manhunt that would surely ensue if the boys were missing or found dead, saved their lives. Ted also wrote that the shootings would undoubtedly have ended his bombing campaign, so he backed off and allowed the forest desecraters to escape.
The thought of that near-fatal experience made me cringe and led the three of us into a discussion about Ted’s cowardice: If he couldn’t carry out an act in a pusillanimous way he wouldn’t carry it out at all.
Dave had another equally chilling example: Ted wrote about a wire he had stretched across a mountain trail at neck height to snag motorcyclists.
I had found a similar wire many years earlier, and took it down and wrapped it around a tree, I said.
Dave said Ted had written about stretching a wire between two trees across a trail, and described the location. FBI agents had found it the previous summer. But Ted wrote about setting more than one such trap. We wondered how many more deadly wires could still be out there in the woods.
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
At the end of Summer ’75 after the roaring by of motorcycles near my camp spoiled a hike for me, I put a piece of wire across a trail where cycle-tracks were visible, at about neck height for a motorcyclist. (Next summer I found someone had wrapped the wire safely around a tree. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone was injured by it.)
UNDATED JOURNAL ENTRY
Summer ’77…I strung a neck-wire for motorcyclists along the divide trail above [location]. Later I found the wire was gone. Whether it hurt anyone I don’t know.
Another mystery solved.
Max, Dave, and I hiked farther south upstream until we came to a fork in the creek. We hopped across the side fork and followed it through a flat area loaded with wild herbs.
As I started naming some of the vegetation, including yellow monkeyflower, bog orchid, arrowleaf groundsel, and pink penstamen, I also noted the thick carpet of light-green sphagnum moss covering the ground.
Max broke in and told me about one of Ted’s accounts that mentioned sphagnum moss. I replied it was a common form of vegetation found in many areas near Stemple.
We moved on, explored briefly some of the historical areas of the gulch and decided to head back, since the day was wearing on. Even though we hadn’t found anything monumental that day, there were successes, and Dave and Max were satisfied to have stood in the place Ted had described as his “Most Secret Camp.”
We made good time hiking down the mountain, which left enough of the afternoon to explore the old mine tunnel. We stopped at one of my sheds to grab extra lighting, climbed to the old mine adit and carefully crawled inside the body-sized opening I had dug out several weeks earlier.
I led the way with Dave close behind. Max would have no part of the underground adventure and waited outside. We followed the tunnel, dark and musty because of the stagnant air, some seventy-five to one hundred feet. We couldn’t find anything that could be clearly linked to Ted, even though many objects littered the inside. They could have been carried in by pack rats as well as Ted.
Ducking under overhanging rock and crawling through the tunnel, which was chiseled and blasted out of sedimentary shale, made one appreciate the hard work and danger hard-rock miners faced as they followed veins of gold into the mountainside.
As we crawled back through the small adit, squinting as our eyes adjusted to the sunlight, Max snapped a couple of photos. He suggested that the pictures would probably end up on the safety bulletin board back at FBI headquarters, an example of what an agent shouldn’t do in the field.
We climbed down from the old mine and returned to the house, where we settled into a discussion about more of Ted’s strange characteristics. Max said he was amazed by the vile language Ted used in his writings and how viciously he attacked friend and foe, even members of his own family.
Finally, as the early evening air cooled, Dave and Max drove back out the gulch to Stemple Road and to Lincoln, eager to reach their motel room.
Over supper, Betty and I conversed about the day’s events and wh
at I had learned. One piece of information really embarrassed her. As we came back down the mountainside, Max, Dave, and I had stopped along the trail where we could easily look down on our house. I jokingly said Ted could have peered into our atrium windows from that spot and watched us climb into our large spa, night or day. It wasn’t a joking matter, they said. Ted had watched people frequently and wrote about it, which really surprised me.
But even that little bit of information left an indelible mark on us and our lifestyle. My wife would never again enter our spa while the lights were turned on.
The next day we had planned another trip to the secret cabin. After Max and Dave arrived, I piloted them back to the shelf high on the mountainside by a roundabout route, actually passing the cutoff point and then backtracking on an oblique angle.
We approached from a different direction, walking in to the east side of the cabin site. I wanted Max and Dave to fully appreciate the secretive location Ted had chosen and that it had all of the qualifications of a hideout and none of a campsite.
We took off our packs and started to carefully remove all the metal items from the inside of the cabin and then searched both inside and out with a metal detector.
As we worked I really noticed the decomposition of some of the more fragile items I had tried to protect so diligently while waiting for the FBI to arrive. That confirmed my theory that things deteriorated quickly when left unattended in the harsh mountain elements, so Ted had surely used the cabin on a regular basis, right up to the fall and winter before his arrest.
Nothing new was found during this search.
Then I was surprised, and disappointed, as was Dave, when Max said this would be our last day out in the field.
Dave wanted to stay and continue the searches, feeling we were just getting a good start.
I argued we could find Ted’s missing 30-30 and try to link it to the shooting many years ago of an area miner as he stood on the top of his washing plant. Authorities had retrieved the slug from the victim and could perform a ballistics test if we could find the rifle. The statute of limitations had run out, but Dave especially wanted to close the book on yet another unsolved case.