ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260090
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: BARBARA VOBEJDA AND LORRAINE ADAMS THE WASHINGTON POST
AT least three times in the 18 years they pursued the serial killer known as the Unabomber, investigators thought they had their man. Once, they waited anxiously for the FBI lab to finish its forensic tests, hoping the minuscule markings on a bomb's fragments would match a suspect's tool so they could declare the case solved.
But there was no match, this or any other time.
With this month's arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the nearly two-decade investigation has been opened to hindsight and critique. Many of the hundreds of law enforcement officers involved remember it as an intensely frustrating manhunt in which sophisticated technique was stymied again and again by a bomber's intricate, illogical pattern.
In retrospect, it seems odd that Kaczynski's name did not surface earlier as law enforcement slowly built the likely killer's profile and checked it repeatedly against computerized lists that tracked his movements. Kaczynski came from the Chicago area - a hunch investigators had about the bomber from the beginning - and spent a few years in Berkeley at the campus hardest hit by the terrorist.
But in the end, it took Kaczynski to do what millions of federal dollars and hundreds of agents could not do. He got himself caught.
``The man was so elusive ... that for years you were just pretty much sitting there waiting for the next bomb to go off,'' said Charles R. Clauson, former chief postal inspector for the U.S. Postal Service, which worked the case along with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
It was 1985 - seven years after the first attack - before the Unabomber case became a top FBI priority. Then, it took on an almost blinding thoroughness and obsession with secrecy that some believe hurt the case.
Going to the public for help - the strategy that ultimately led to Kaczynski's arrest - was avoided for years out of fear that it would do more harm than good. Instead, investigators depended on their own analyses, for years chasing what they believed to be a blue-collar airline worker possibly acting on a grudge - not the highly educated Luddite they finally arrested.
The case involved scattered evidence, 53,000 hot line tips, roomfuls of bomb parts and massive computer databases, none pointing cleanly to a killer. Investigators examined, to varying degrees, 2,400 suspects, as many as 300 at a time. Fewer than a dozen were considered serious suspects.
Generally, investigators rely on serial killers to make a mistake, or trigger suspicions among associates. But Kaczynski, if he is the Unabomber, had no associates. He waited years to make the blunder that tipped his hand - communicating with the world in a lengthy screed that his brother recognized as Kaczynski's writing style.
When a small smokeless bomb exploded on a Chicago-area campus in 1978, police had no way to predict it was the first of a series, or that the carved wooden box in which it was sent would become a Unabomber trademark.
No one died. No political group claimed responsibility. A security guard was injured, but as domestic terrorism went, it was a footnote. The same held true with the second bomb in 1979, which injured a Northwestern University graduate student.
But when a third bomb detonated on an airplane bound from Chicago to Washington, forensic scientists who studied the bits of lamp cord, handmade screws and wood switches saw a clear pattern.
After the fourth explosion in 1980 near Chicago, which injured United Airlines president Percy Wood at his home, officials named their investigation ``UNABOM'' because the bomber seemed to be targeting universities and airlines.
They theorized that the bomber was from Chicago and possibly a current or former airline employee. Investigators drew up lists of airline passengers traveling around that time and soured employees. Neither would have turned up Kaczynski; he favored travel by bicycle and bus, and had never worked for an airline.
Along with his packages, the bomber sometimes left tantalizing clues, such as a cryptic note left for Wood and a letter sent much later to Yale University bomb victim David Gerlernter.
After a bomb was defused in Salt Lake City and another exploded at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the seventh bomb hit the campus of the University of California at Berkeley on July 2, 1982, and complicated matters. It moved the search to the West Coast, generating thousands more names to check, a new roster of investigators, and a fresh group of victims to interview for connections, motives, backgrounds.
The bomb, left in a faculty room in Cory Hall, injured Professor Diogenes Angelakos.
Kaczynski had been at Berkeley from 1967 to 1969, a brilliant mathematics professor who left abruptly. But as investigators plugged the names of former professors into the computer, Kaczynski's stint was too remote in time to attract attention.
For three years the bomber was quiet. But on May 15, 1985, another bomb exploded in Berkeley's Cory Hall, maiming graduate student John Hauser. Two more were mailed before a December 1985 explosion in Sacramento, which killed Hugh C. Scrutton outside a Rentech computer store. Scrutton was the Unabomber's first fatality.
After the 1985 bombings, an FBI headquarters supervisor was assigned to coordinate the investigation, marking a change that would bring a new level of thoroughness - and secrecy.
Some thought the only solution was to take the case to the public, and debate brewed about how much information to release. Ray Biondi, who commanded the Sacramento Sheriff's Department on the Scrutton case, contends the secrecy was the investigation's biggest mistake and attributes the problem to the FBI.
``I was trying to release more details of the destruction and photos of the scene, letters the Unabomber had written in the past,'' he said. ``The FBI nixed all the photos of the crime scenes.''
Biondi and others were pleased when NBC planned a January 1987 episode of its crime show, ``Unsolved Mysteries,'' about the case. But federal agents raised so many concerns the show was canceled - at least for a time. When the bomber struck again in February 1987, and federal agents were left perplexed once again, they relaxed their objections and the show aired.
The FBI created a formal task force in San Francisco, bringing in investigators from around the country. Overnight, the number of investigators expanded from a handful to 30; by last year, it had ballooned to 150.
Behavioral experts worked on a new suspect profile, an assignment that became the source of disagreement.
The early profile said the Unabomber was probably a white man in his mid-30s to early 40s, raised in the Chicago area, high school educated, perhaps with some college or trade school. The notion that he was an airline worker was based on his airline targets and the soldering technique and bombing materials he used.
But the new profile drawn up in 1993 by FBI agents William Tafoya and Mary Ellen O'Toole described the bomber as older, by then in his 50s, and a Luddite, a person opposed to technology. The experts speculated that the killer was well-educated, probably with a graduate degree in ``something like electrical engineering or math,'' said Tafoya, now retired.
Task force leaders, Tafoya said, disagreed with these findings and chose to adhere to the earlier profile, although only the early bombs had an airline connection.
Within the past two years, investigators came to believe that the bomber was becoming emotionally charged, reaching what one of them called ``critical mass.''
The killer had given his trackers more to go on: new bombs, multiple letters. One letter threatened to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, another called the threat a prank. All held clues.
When the bomber offered to stop killing if his 56-page ``manifesto'' called ``Industrial Society and Its Future'' was published, the matter went to law enforcement's highest levels. While some officials believed that publication would give the terrorist a victory, others believed that The Washington Post and the New York Times should print it. (The Post did so last fall in cooperation with the Times.) The document offered new clues to the author's age, academic background and home town.
Officials dug and hunted in Chicago, photocopying yearbooks for Ecology Clubs from the 1970s in Skokie, Ill. They interviewed Chicago-area professors, asking them to read the manifesto and see if its philosophy reminded them of anyone.
The FBI went public with some portions of Unabomber letters, but some investigators still thought the approach was too guarded. The task force continued its painstaking, geographically disparate queries.
These searches might have gone on for years, if David Kaczynski had not read the manifesto and puzzled over its similarities to his brother's writings.
``It took the brother in this case,'' said Michael Rustigan, a criminology professor at San Francisco State University who has studied the case. ``The brother broke the case, clearly. It was luck.''
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