Tracking the Unabomber: More luck than computer analysis
By Paul Ferguson
Special to CNN Interactive
(CNN) -- It was his unexplained break from hermit-like loner to publicity hound that led the FBI to a cabin door in Montana.
In an odd twist, prosecutors say, the Unabomber's ego helped root him out. If a jury agrees, it means the end the longest, costliest manhunt for a serial killer in U.S. history.
After 17 years of anonymity, the bomber last year began to crave the publicity he had so long eschewed. Some link his emergence to the terror of the Oklahoma City bombing. Within five days of that devastating blast, the Unabomber had another deadly package in the mail on its way to the president of a California forestry group.
In letters to a newspaper, he threatened to bomb an airplane. But he also wrote that he would stop the bombings if the New York Times and the Washington Post published his 35,000 word manifesto.
The newspapers agreed. It was that manifesto that led the FBI to Theodore John Kaczynski. Or, more accurately, he to them.
The link came through Kaczynski's brother, David, who came across some of Ted's writings while helping clean out his mother's attic.
David was stunned by the tone and wording of some of the old letters. He sensed an uncanny resemblance to the manifesto written by the Unabomber. Through a friend, a lawyer, he contacted the FBI.
Federal authorities had already spent 18 agonizing years on the case. Their toll-free number had logged some 20,000 calls. They had conducted thousands of interviews; run through a list of more than 200 possible suspects. They reportedly consulted with clairvoyants.
A groups of agents -- FBI, U.S. Postal inspectors, investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- spent countless hours examining the few scraps of evidence they had. And they despaired over the mountain of data they were missing.
The bomber, they knew, sometimes used types of wires that were out of production. He always used stamps long past their issue dates. He scraped the labels off batteries to erase their serial numbers.
And he fashioning macabre signatures in his handiwork, apparently to let agents know his work was being studied.
Many of the references were to wood. In a bomb sent to the president of United Airlines named, interestingly, Percy Wood, the explosive arrived as a book from Arbor House publishing. The cover had a leaf on it.
Agents also knew the bomber was a man with a lot of time to spare.
"Some of the components bear markings of having been put together and taken apart repeatedly," said Chris Ronay, a top FBI expert.
"It's not just that he's creating something carefully. He marks things with numbers so he can put the together again right," Ronay said.
Agents on the case borrowed a computer from the Pentagon in order to parallel-process the massive scraps of information.
They entered school lists, drivers license records and the names of those who withdrew certain books from libraries around California and the Midwest.
But in the end the federal government, with its advanced technology and large task force, could not find the genius sociopath. It was the bomber's own need to broadcast his views that landed Kaczynski in federal prison.
Said Ken Thompson, a recently-retired FBI domestic terrorism specialist: "Submitting the manifesto and writing letters indicated someone at a point in his life where he wanted to gain the popularity of what he had done."
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