Federal agents working on a tip from suspicious family members closed in on an isolated Montana cabin Wednesday and detained a former college math teacher for questioning as a key suspect in the Unabomber case, one of the longest- running murder mysteries in modern criminal history.
Although no charges were immediately filed, federal agents in Washington said Theodore J. Kaczynski, 53, a hermit with roots in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park and a curriculum vitae that may have carried him all the way to Afghanistan, was detained while his cabin was scoured for evidence.
Local residents described him as a private man who frequently rode a dilapidated bicycle into Lincoln, where he visited the library or used the pay phone at the telephone office.
Dressed in black or in Army fatigues, he would collect his library books and then carry them home in saddlebags on his bike. Occasionally, he would visit the Wilderness Tavern in town for a beer.
“He was a really strange man,” phone company manager Bob Orr said. “He left people alone, and they left him alone.”
Larry Tighe, 44, just moved in and hadn’t met him personally, but he said Kaczynski seemed “very friendly. He waved and smiled all the time. He looks like a hippie type.”
There were reports that an arraignment had been scheduled for Thursday morning in Helena. In Washington, Justice Department sources said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno had planned a news conference to discuss the investigation.
The search and detention ended weeks of delicate, secretive investigation by federal authorities. A small team of agents slipped into Lincoln, a town of 17,500, to gather whatever they could on Kaczynski, who has lived in a cabin near Stemple Pass between Lincoln and Helena on the Continental Divide since the early 1970s.
The authorities launched their investigation of Kaczynski after family members, preparing for a move from their suburban Lombard home, discovered in the attic papers that were similar to writings attributed to the Unabomber.
The bomber has been a high-priority target for federal authorities since May 1978, when his first device exploded at Northwestern University in Evanston. There have been 15 more explosions, which killed three people and injured 23 over the past 18 years. The last bomb exploded in April 1995, killing a lumber industry lobbyist in California.
What was found of the devices told a story, but not enough of a story to produce solid clues.
The person who built the bombs was so sophisticated he could make his own switches and preferred that to purchasing them at hardware stores. Sometimes match scrapings or other chemicals provided the fuels. Most of the bombs were tightly contained, which enhanced their explosive force.
Some were enclosed in meticulously polished wooden cases.
Investigators have pursued thousands upon thousands of leads over the years and have turned the probe into a state-of-the-art campaign, complete with specially written computer programs, massive data banks and a collection of cross-referenced reports that have covered every conceivable avenue in the pursuit of the killer.
But it was apparently the persistence of Kaczynski’s brother, David, a philosophy professor in Schenectady, N.Y., that led authorities to the lonely cabin in the mountains.
The Kaczynski family was cleaning its Lombard home in preparation for selling it earlier this year when they found some of Theodore’s writings, according to the FBI. There were similarities between those documents and long polemics the bomber had sent to The New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets.
The Post and the Times published the bomber’s 35,000-word article, which cast him as a contemporary Luddite obsessed with the influence of technology–particularly computer technology–on modern life. In addition to academics, computer stores and airlines were among his targets over the years.
David Kaczynski contacted an attorney friend in Washington who acted as an intermediary to turn the evidence over to the authorities. Once officials reviewed it, the agents sought permission to search the Lombard residence, where his family lived after Kaczynski left for Harvard and later, the University of Michigan.
At Michigan, Kaczynski wrote a doctoral thesis in 1967 on “Boundary Functions,” an abstract study that deals with varying points on Euclidian planes and Rieman spheres. Afterward, he taught mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1967-68 school year.
The 1995 Harvard alumni directory lists Kaczynski as living in Khadar Khel, Afghanistan, but included an asterisk and said it was still researching his address.
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Agents theorize his experience at Berkeley in an era of loose sex and rampant drug use among students shocked him, soured him on academia and led him to what was to become a hermit’s life far from the turmoil and technology of urban America.
They won’t say what they found in the search of the family home in Lombard, other than to note that it advanced the investigation.
The Kaczynski family had approached the FBI in Washington about its suspicions earlier, one source said, but didn’t have much success. Others said that may have been because the investigation is headquartered in San Francisco, and it took some time for the tip to work its way through the process.
The investigators have been focusing closely on Kaczynski since early this year, but they worried constantly about the challenge of setting up surveillance on someone who lived such an isolated life, in a cabin with no running water, no toilet facilities and no heat.
The location of the tar-paper-covered cabin in Montana was so wild and isolated that one agent on a surveillance team said he watched a cougar kill a deer.
“The difficulty in investigating was that there are so few people up there. We just couldn’t go up into those hills and start asking questions for fear it would get back to him,” an investigator said.
They wanted to search the property, they said, because they have no physical evidence linking the man to the bombings. Among other things, they were looking for the vintage typewriter that was used to draft the long letters to the newspapers and for any equipment that could have been used by a master bombmaker so adept at hiding his trail.
“We like the looks of this guy as the Unabomber, but we don’t have make or break evidence yet,” a federal agent said. “We have some writings that match up, but we don’t have his tools yet. We want the irrefutable mother lode of evidence.”
One goal of the investigation has been to place Kaczynski in towns when and where the bombings occurred. To that end, a team of 15 agents from the San Francisco task force flew to Salt Lake City and dug into police and court records looking for any sign of his presence.
Federal agents also visited homeless shelters, soup kitchens, the Salvation Army and other social service agencies in an attempt to see whether Kaczynski was there in the early 1980s, when the Unabomber sent or planted several devices in Utah.
“They were trying to find where he may have been,” said one Utah law enforcement official. “They want to establish a timeline to show that he was here the day the device was planted.”