Unabomber

by Dave Shors

  Interspersed were questions about Ted’s wardrobe and grooming. I described his two kinds of clothing, his somewhat nicer going-to-town clothes and his everyday garb, which he never washed and wore until it was “indecent” and would no longer stay on his body.

  When asked if Ted had an offensive odor, I said it was a smoky, musty, musky smell. Other people had noticed it, too. I said that when Ted would leave the library one of the workers, or the librarian herself, would liberally spray the interior with a deodorizer to mask the strong pungent smell that lingered. Dietz asked whether this odor ever prevented me from offering rides or visiting, and I said “Absolutely not.” I knew that Ted’s heat stove leaked smoke and ash. He had no bathroom facilities and when the weather was bad he would relieve himself in a newspaper and then burn it in his stove. Dietz later returned to this topic to ask whether Ted’s physical state seemed to decline.

  Another point Dietz pursued was the quality of our friendship, whether it seemed genuine or whether Ted was using me. Was it one-sided or mutual, and had it deepened or become strained over the years? Had our contact increased or decreased over the years? When asked whether Ted ever was unfriendly, I explained that he hadn’t been so to me, but had towards Betty.

  The other area Dietz asked about was how much of his personal history Ted had revealed: home, family, education, girlfriends. I said I knew he had gone to college, but not for how long, or where.

  They didn’t stay long after the interview concluded. Max said they still had to stop down the road and visit with Butch. Then they’d drive to Lincoln before heading back to Helena to catch their plane.

  The whole interview lasted several hours and that time proved to be a crucial loss on the roofing project. After they left, I worked late into the evening before calling it quits in the pitch dark.

  The next morning a fresh, wet snowfall draped the forest with an early winter look and made roofing extremely dangerous. Disappointed, I drove to Lincoln to pick up some nails and screws at the hardware store.

  I ran into a few Lincoln friends and quickly discovered the town was buzzing—the shroud of secrecy regarding the psychiatrists was a joke. Not only did everyone seem to know they had been in town, but after leaving Butch’s, the entire group spent the rest of the late afternoon and evening dining and socializing at a local steakhouse.

  There are few secrets in a small town. Whom they interviewed was not one of them. Once again the leaks came directly from the very source that demanded secrecy on our part.

  Back at home, I checked the answering machine and found new media messages and more calls coming in at a rapid pace. The word had spread quickly that the psychiatrists had visited.

  Some secrecy!

  During the next two weeks I faced a juggling act between spending every possible moment working on the garage, in spite of the inclement weather, and fielding the continuing barrage of phone calls.

  The psychiatrists’ visit had only intensified interest.

  Everyone on the outside seemed to know. Calls poured in from all over the country, including ones from the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, and Newsweek, with reporters wanting to know every detail about the interviews.

  Finally, I let the answering machine be the secretary, noted who left messages and when, but refused to return a single call because of the confidentiality of the case.

  Working on the roof gave me plenty of time to mull over some of the puzzling actions of the past several months.

  The things of most concern were the secret cabin and why the FBI had left vital evidence behind. Clues gleaned from the psychiatrists seemed to support my theory that the defense didn’t know of it. They didn’t ask any direct questions about the secret cabin, as if it didn’t exist. At one point I brought up the subject, but they passed over it and went to another question like they hadn’t heard anything.

  During our phone conversations, I often asked Dave if Ted and the defense team were aware the secret cabin had been discovered. His usual reply was “No, I’m pretty sure they still don’t know.”

  It seemed strange. The prosecution had so much evidence against Ted, why would they risk the potential damage of going against the basic rules of discovery in a criminal case?

  But it would be hard to refute evidence to the contrary. A fingerprint, which I felt sure was Ted’s, had been left clearly imprinted in the black paint on the brush handle found in the cabin, locked there like a fossil, and much of his clothing was found inside. Plus his journal entries and other pieces of evidence, including Ted’s own handwritten notations on a cabin wall, were convincing proof he used the cabin often.

  There was one thing for certain: I wouldn’t lie if asked about the cabin by the judge or even the defense.

  It seemed the prosecution still wanted the 30-30 rifle because of the serial number. But they didn’t want to examine anything else, figuring then they wouldn’t have to inform the defense about the secret cabin. The only plausible explanation seemed to be they were going for the jugular and wanted the death penalty.

  It was no secret that an insanity defense was probably Ted’s only chance to escape the death penalty. The defense’s plan to use his home cabin to show a pattern of isolationism, and thus his mental state, was widely reported. They had trucked Ted’s home cabin from Great Falls to Sacramento so the jury could examine the oppressive structure and even walk through it.

  At one point, defense lawyer Quin Denvir said that to enter the cabin was to enter the troubled mind of Kaczynski, who Denvir believed was a paranoid schizophrenic. The defense wanted to show he wasn’t an evil person, but a sick one.

  The prosecution indicated it would oppose an insanity defense and the use of the cabin as evidence for that reason.

  If Ted’s 10-by-12-foot home cabin, which had been located near other homes and cabins, portrayed paranoid schizophrenia, what would an 8-by-8-foot secret cabin, located high on a mountainside miles from others, do to help the defense’s case? It was obvious to me the prosecution didn’t want to find out. It seemed as though it had become personal. They wanted Ted executed.

  These theories and ideas were supported further when on Wednesday, October 29, a woman parked out on the main road and approached as I was working out in the yard. She introduced herself as Susan Garvey, a member of Ted’s California-based defense team. Knowing I had refused to meet with defense lawyers the previous fall, she wondered if I might now be willing to talk.

  It seemed like the situation had changed, and I definitely wanted to confirm my theory about the secret cabin, so I said we could. We ended up standing in the yard for the better part of two hours, discussing Ted and the case.

  She described in great detail the need for jurors to learn as much as possible about the area where Ted lived.

  Of course, she wanted to know if I liked Ted and considered him a friend. I told her I had, until he refused to see me after inviting me to visit him in the Helena jail, and asked her to tell Ted I had forgiven him for that. She covered the ground of what our interactions had been over the years. I mentioned that I had trusted Ted and was glad to have him roaming about my gulch, believing he would tell me if he noticed anything unusual happening.

  She asked what I thought about the supposedly secret visit from the “shrinks,” and what they had asked; I wouldn’t answer. Later she inquired what I thought about Ted’s refusal to submit to a psychiatric exam, and I said it didn’t surprise me; knowing Ted, I thought he wouldn’t want to be accused of being crazy. I also explained that Ted’s lifestyle wasn’t that unusual for this area and I had lived much the same way early on, before I was married. She referred to Ted’s dirty skin and torn clothing at the time of his arrest, so I told her I thought he may have been sheltering in his root house during the cold nights.

  We discussed many other topics that others had wanted to know about, but the time was fleeting and there was plenty to cover, so we decided to talk more the next day. She was working with another person from the defense tea
m, Courtney Bell. I was sure they would take the information shared and use it to structure trial questioning. With jury selection slated to begin in mere days, time was of the essence for both the defense and the prosecution.

  Evening came with the usual phone calls. Despite the intense media pressure there was little new information in stories about Ted. It was apparent no one else knew about Ted’s twenty-five-year secret life in Lincoln. Certain reporters also realized that and were beginning to zero in on me. There wasn’t much I could do about it, so I was just glad to live within the boundaries and safety of my gulch, shielded by my answering machine.

  Betty and I turned in early that night. I was really feeling bad about what the case had done to her. It had not only been causing a huge disruption in our private lives, but it also had affected Betty personally. She wasn’t able to go anywhere without being asked questions. It also was taking much time away from things that needed to be done. She was very understanding, but would be glad when it was all over.

  The following morning the weather had changed for the worse—disappointing, but not surprising. A cold wind was blowing from the west and light rain was trying to turn into snow, especially higher on the mountainside where it started to cling to the trees. Bad weather was inevitable, as it was the end of October. We were living on borrowed time, weatherwise.

  Around noon Susan drove up into the yard. I met her outside and said I had to go up into the woods about a mile to check on some things. If she would go along we could talk up there as easily as we could at the house.

  “Great,” she replied.

  As we headed up along the old miners’ road I told her she was one of a select few who had entered the area in recent years.

  She jokingly asked if she should be blindfolded.

  But soon she was looking open-eyed at the mountain peaks in awe. “Now I know why Ted loved this gulch so much; it’s beautiful up here.”

  I checked to make sure some of my equipment was properly covered and then we went into one of our campers parked there and resumed the interview. It was an expanded version of our discussion the afternoon before, and covered many now-familiar paths of the prosecutors’ and psychiatrists’ questions about certain topics. But some of her questions went in new directions.

  Susan asked why I had kept such close track of Ted and the places he liked to hike. Not to violate his privacy, I said, but to be there in case he got sick or hurt—it’s just part of the old-school, mountain-man code of ethics to be there if your neighbor needs help.

  When she asked what I thought about Ted’s cabin, I said its size wasn’t unusual for a mountain cabin. There are several smaller ones right here in my gulch where old-time miners lived. She acted surprised. It was a matter of efficiency, I went on. The smaller the cabin, the less area to heat during our long Lincoln winters.

  We talked in detail about certain acts of violence and vandalism that had occurred around Lincoln, but I didn’t say Ted was responsible or that I had already read his admissions of guilt in his journals.

  We talked extensively about the country, its present condition, the mistakes of the past made in logging and mining, and the government’s polices about logging and mining. I gave a brief history of my work—logging, road construction, mining—and described some of the environmental benefits, like eliminating bug infestations in the woods by logging selected stands of trees.

  Later on, she returned to environmental concerns and asked about the huge new mining venture planned for the Lincoln area and whether I was for or against it. I explained I wasn’t against mining if it was conducted responsibly, but I was against reckless operations. She asked about logging, and my response was much the same. Any activity conducted in the forests, even recreation, needed to be managed in accordance with responsible guidelines. Recreationalists can literally love the forest to death.

  She inquired about the large piles of gravel and rocks that lined parts of Stemple Pass Road along Poorman Creek, what they were called and how they got there. I explained they were called tailing piles or dredge piles and were the remains of earlier placer mining operations.

  She wondered when the piles were made and when the placer operation was running. More than forty years ago, I said, and then told her that hand-placer mining dated back more than 130 years, starting in this area as early as 1863 and changing little until mechanized methods took over well into the present century.

  She asked why the piles were still here and I explained reclamation during the earlier years was non-existent. I said nature is in the business of slowly healing the wounds inflicted by man, noting the many trees and shrubs growing on the tailing piles. Education and public awareness has helped forge modern reclamation methods.

  She asked if I ever discussed Ted with others. Rarely, I replied, except occasionally with Butch Gehring, as when Butch was sure Ted had vandalized his sawmill, but I had defended him.

  She talked extensively about the separate guilt and penalty phases of the upcoming trial and asked if I had any questions about procedures. Surprisingly, she said the prosecution had a “very strong case against Ted,” indicating a guilty verdict was very likely. She said the defense would be focusing a great deal on the penalty phase and that I would probably be called as a defense witness.

  As we headed back down the gulch to her car the light rain spattered on the windshield of my old work truck and the wipers worked in a rhythmic whine.

  From her questions, it looked like the defense wanted to portray Ted’s mental state and use environmental issues to help show the jury some of the outside influences that spurred his progressive mental decline.

  Dave Weber called that afternoon and was pleased to learn about the two visits with Susan. He said chief prosecutor Robert Cleary would be interested in what she had asked. He would talk to Cleary and call the following day.

  I said, “Okay,” but as I hung up the phone that uneasy feeling of being caught in the middle returned. I wanted to do what was right, but was anyone else’s sense of right the same as mine?

  The next day a break in the weather allowed me to work on the garage in earnest while struggling with what might happen in the case.

  Dave called that afternoon and said since it was Friday, Cleary would contact me next week. He wanted to talk about Susan’s line of questioning to help understand the direction Ted’s lawyers were going with his defense.

  I told Dave more pictures would be on the way soon, and then asked if he had heard anything new regarding the secret cabin and when he would return to Lincoln. He was vague about the cabin and said it didn’t appear he’d be able to return. That didn’t surprise me. I decided not to mention the secret cabin again.

  As soon as our conversation ended I went into the next room and told Betty we had to go on a hike that weekend. She asked where and why.

  “To Ted’s secret cabin—you’ll see why.”

  Sunday morning we packed up a half dozen large, strong plastic sacks. I grabbed my camera and a jug of water, and we started along the trail above our house to the secret cabin.

  If the FBI wasn’t going to gather and preserve evidence, then I would. I already had placed many items inside Ted’s cooking pots, but that was only a temporary fix. The rubber gloves and clothing would disintegrate or be used by animals for nesting material. They wouldn’t survive the winter. The FBI already had a complete set of photographs, and if anything was needed for the trial I would have it close at hand.

  A main concern was the important items—like the plywood with his handwritten note on it, the fingerprinted brush handle, rubber gloves, gray hooded sweatshirt, and light blue denim pants like those he was wearing when spotted in Salt Lake City—be preserved indefinitely. It was all an important part of Lincoln’s history and should be shared with the rest of the country.

  Before long Betty and I were standing outside the secret cabin door. The day was gray and overcast, so we didn’t waste any time. We filled the bags with everything we could carry, concen
trating on the most important and fragile items. Then we headed back down the mountain.

  On Wednesday, November 5, Dave called and said he had received the pictures. I didn’t breathe a word to him about moving the evidence.

  He said the new Unabom office was located high above and right across from the courthouse where the trial would be held, a great vantage point for everything that was happening.

  He said the media had pooled resources and rented a half-block parking lot from the city. It must have been expensive, he said, considering the cost of just one downtown parking space. The power company had moved some new main feeds into the media area and mobile satellite uplinks were being set up. The total price tag for all this, Dave said, was a staggering half a million dollars a day.

  He said Cleary had been caught up preparing his opening statement, filing motions, and other important trial work, so he hadn’t been able to call me.

  Then Dave surprised me by asking if I would send them all my notes from the defense interviews. I didn’t respond immediately, feeling uncomfortable. Answering questions from Cleary over the phone was one thing, turning over notes was another—something that didn’t seem ethical.

  I told Dave it would be better if Cleary called, especially since the notes were condensed and would be extremely hard for anyone else to decipher.

  Jury selection was scheduled to begin in a few days, but Dave said he hadn’t seen the witness list from either side. It probably would be compiled at the last minute.

  The next week flew by as I continued construction on the garage. Dave didn’t call again until November 14, a Friday. He was back in San Francisco. They’d been swamped. The office spaces in Sacramento were very small and the media pressure was “unbelievable.”

  Robert Cleary hadn’t had time to call, Dave explained, because he was caught in the middle of a pre-trial tussle over disclosure about the so-called “unchargeable offenses.”

  He went on to explain that unchargeable offenses were crimes Ted had confessed to in his journals, but from which he was protected by the statute of limitations, or else the offenses had never been reported.