Unabomber: In His Own Words (2020): Season 1, Episode 3 - Part Three - full transcript
In 1993,
the Unabomber reappears.
He's been gone a long time,
and he wants to make sure
that everyone realizes
he's back.
And the FBI says
that a letter bomb
was mailed to the home
of one this country's foremost
geneticists.
He is in critical condition
tonight in Northern California.
- It's a rather large shock.
People had gotten used
to the idea
that the Unabomber would never
be heard from again.
And all of a sudden,
he's not just back,
but he is back in a big way.
Dr. Epstein,
a genetics researcher
at the University of California
San Francisco,
has made advances in the study
of Down's Syndrome.
- And who could blame him?
He lost his eardrums
and fingers to this guy
just because he was doing
his job,
trying to help humanity.
Investigators say
they found no link
between the attack
and Epstein's work.
- As a reporter,
I talked to Epstein,
and Dr. Epstein, in particular,
was mad till the day he died,
and I don't blame him
one tiny bit.
The letter bomb
went off at 8:30 this morning
at Yale's computer science
center.
38-year-old associate professor
David Gelernter
was opening his mail
in his fifth-floor office
when the letter bomb exploded.
- So now you have two devices,
one goes to a geneticist,
the other goes to a computer
science professor
at Yale University.
The historical significance
of the case
is not lost on people.
There's been nothing like this
in FBI history.
The two attacks
this week
have raised fears
that a serial bomber
blamed for a dozen explosions
in the late '70s and '80s
may be back at work.
- Overnight,
the decision is made
to reinvigorate
the investigation
by putting a lot of resources
into it.
- They're getting thousands
of tips.
Nut cases, kinda nut cases,
people you take somewhat
seriously,
and then ones who think,
"Wow, maybe you got a point."
It's exhausting.
- We're taking in so much
information,
what if something gets past us?
That was the fear we live,
we live with all the time;
that the answer has come to us
and we've passed it by.
No. It was
simply anger and revenge
and I was...
was going to strike back.
Try not to get blown up.
Local, State,
and Federal investigators
continue to work around
the clock
collecting evidence
from the blast.
I would imagine
it would be
a relatively quick
determination from residue
that we can tell what kind
of explosive was involved.
- He's now using a chlorate
mixture that he's created
which no longer requires a pipe
to contain it.
So, it explodes on its own
once it's initiated.
- We have an announcement
of a piece of evidence
in the case
which has never been made
public before.
- The New York Times receives
a letter
from the Unabomber.
Rather short - it's a double
spaced paragraph,
not a lot of words -
claiming credit
for these bombings.
Investigators at the time
have hopes
that it will provide
some clues.
So, you have the typeface,
what kind of typewriter
wrote this?
Where did the paper come from?
Can you figure that out?
Is the paper significant
in some way?
Where it was mailed?
The type of stamps?
Is there any DNA under the flap
of the envelope?
Are there any fingerprints
on the paper
or on the envelope?
None of that,
there's none of that.
There's no good forensic
evidence.
What there is, on this letter,
is indented writing.
The sort of impressions
which are created by writing
on a surface
with a piece of paper
under that surface,
so you've left no ink marks
or pencil marks,
but you've left an indentation.
"Call Nathan R.
Wednesday, 7pm."
This is taken by
the investigators
as a mistake that
the Unabomber has made.
Finally, he has made a mistake.
- If any members of the public
know a Nathan R.
or have any idea as to who
that person might be
and in what context,
that information would be
of critical importance for us.
- We were looking for
Nathan R.'s everywhere.
It was crazy.
- All the task force has to do
is find every single one
of them,
and one of them will know
who the Unabomber is.
Because he's going to receive
a phone call,
on Wednesday at 7pm.
How hard can this be, right?
Well, it's tremendously hard.
Um...
there are a lot of people
named Nathan R.
- So, you go calling
and, you know,
you've chased down
15 different ways
of getting to a Nathan R.
Finally, you knock on the door
and the guy says,
you know, "Who are you?
I don't care. Get lost."
It's... there's a lot of that
when you're doing a story
like this.
- Every Nathan R.
that they could find,
and there are thousands
of them.
We had them all interviewed
to ask these questions.
It didn't lead to a solution.
- There's a sense that
he's fooling them.
He's eluding them.
He's toying with them
and taunting them.
- The pressure that the task
force is under
is increased by these taunts.
- Right over there
was Ted's 10 by 12 cabin.
Again, very rustic,
very simple,
just wood cabin,
no electricity,
no running water,
uh, with a green roof.
- It's a bit haunting,
every time I come back here.
I've never felt peaceful.
I mean, we're surrounded
by beautiful trees,
and the birds are chirping,
but I have never,
I would never use that word
to describe how I feel
in this spot.
Not... not peaceful.
- You know, a lot of people
that have perpetrated
a single murder,
uh, regret it for the rest
of their life
and-and will never kill again.
What makes the serial killer
so particularly fascinating
is they've gone through
the trauma of killing someone
and are addicted to it
and are ready to do it again
and again and again.
- The investigators
are picking up
that this is an anarchist
who doesn't like environmental
decimation,
doesn't like people
who-who shill
for anti-environmentalist
causes.
Investigators say
it was a package
sent through the mail
about the size of a home video
cassette.
It killed 50-year-old
Thomas Mosser,
a senior advertising executive
at one of the largest
ad agencies in the world.
- He opens it in his kitchen,
where his wife and young
daughter had been
standing next to him
just moments before,
uh, and he's killed instantly
by the very significant blast
at this point.
- We are all today determined
to end the death
and destruction
that these random bombings
have wrought.
- The pressure to solve it
is immense.
Desperate is perhaps a...
a fair word at that point.
- Unabomb hotline.
So far thousands
of tips
phoned into the San Francisco
Unabomb Taskforce
have led nowhere.
And a one-million-dollar reward
hasn't helped either.
- The phones are ringing
constantly.
We are getting thousands
of calls from the public.
We don't watch TV much.
Um, the first time I ever heard
the term "Unabomber"
was in December of 1994,
when the front page
of our newspaper
said that the Unabomber,
whoever that was,
had struck again and killed
an advertising executive
by the name of Thomas Mosser
in New Jersey.
But I'd never heard the term
before.
- Ted came down here once,
didn't he?
- No.
- He never came here.
- No, I remember him once
planning to come.
He even told me he had
a bus ticket
and that he was going
to arrive on a certain day,
and then he decided not
to come,
and he said he had too much
to do.
And of course, I'm thinking,
too much to do?
I mean, come on, Ted.
What do you have to do?
And of course, at that time,
I didn't know how...
what he meant.
- He and I had never met.
I have still never met him.
I have never, as far as I know,
talked to him over the phone
or anything like that.
He didn't like me.
He didn't want David
to marry me.
He was really furious,
I guess, about the wedding
and, of course, he didn't come.
And he wrote a letter
that was very...
very aggressive.
Oh, it was really awful.
I had never met the guy
and nobody could understand
why Ted was threatening
to break connection with Dave.
Every time David and his mother
got together,
they sat there for hours
talking about Ted.
His mother was very worried
about it
because Ted had cut
relationships to his mother.
So that's how I began
to pick up the sense
that he was... unusual,
and perhaps mentally...
you know, different.
- Linda was the first one
to tell me.
Reading some of my brother's
letters,
hearing family conversation,
she says, "David, your
brother's mentally ill,
you know that, don't you?"
And I said, "Wait a second, you
don't really understand him.
He's a genius, he's different.
He's ba-blah-blah..."
"David, look at this,
people who are healthy
in their minds
don't think like this."
- His basic argument is that
technology is a system
that we really cannot control.
It's causing harm to people
and the environment.
The stresses will increase
on humans and on nature,
and there's no way to modify
or to reform the system
so as to avoid these negative
outcomes.
His conclusion is the system
has to be brought to an end.
We have to have a kind of
revolution against the system,
and to stop it
before it can uh...
lead to these catastrophic
outcomes.
- In 1995, the Unabomber
sends another letter
to the New York Times.
It's three pages of single
spaced typewriting.
It takes credit
for the bombing of
Thomas Mosser,
and he is indicating
that this will continue
"unless".
There's now a, a deal
that's being offered.
The bomber says
he'll desist
from terrorist activities
only if major publications
print a manuscript
advocating the destruction
of the worldwide industrial
system.
- He says the written document
that he wants published
will be coming forth shortly.
The so-called
Unabomber has now spoken out
and taunted the FBI,
calling it a joke.
- In the letter he refers
to the FBI as a joke.
This is somewhat echoing
sentiments
that are coming from political
and media and public circles.
He apparently has jumped on
that bandwagon as well.
The mysterious
Unabomber is claiming
to be part of a group,
quote "The FBI has tried to
portray these bombings
as the work of an isolated nut.
We won't waste our time arguing
about whether we are nuts,
but we certainly are not
isolated."
- He claims to be a group
called "FC"
and he's always very clear
to make sure that his bombs
contain FC
somewhere in there
where the FC will be found
stamped onto a piece of metal,
or etched onto a piece
of metal,
in other words,
intended to survive.
The Unabomber suggested
that part of his motivation
had to do with concerns
about the environment
to try to portray himself as,
perhaps,
some sort of environmental
crusader.
Around the same time,
there were environmental groups
which advocated radical
solutions
to their concerns.
So, it was somewhat
of a logical extension
that he get the task force
to consider
that perhaps he was associated
with groups like that.
- Because there was always this
idea of FC
and the Freedom Club,
I think that the Feds believed
that there were more people
involved
than Kaczynski himself.
And so, they were really
interested
in letting me in there
and letting us talk freely
so that they could gauge
whether or not
Kaczynski was connected
in any way
to any of us in Earth First!
- Earth First! has been
an organization,
from its beginning,
that has been dedicated
to action.
Everything from,
you know, tree sitting,
and other types of
monkeywrenching,
and had been under suspicion
of being tied to radical
environmental terrorism.
- Yeah, the '90s was a trip.
Soon had this slow progression
of radicalism.
And for me,
I noticed it up at a...
the mountains east of town,
and the Earth Firsters were
trying to protect
this forest up there,
which they did.
And these Earth Firsters
created a, a blockade
to prevent loggers
from coming in,
and they won.
In the eyes of
the forest service,
this is destruction of
government property,
a federal offence,
and some critics are even
calling these protesters
domestic terrorists.
Don't move your truck!
Shut your truck off, man!
There's an old woman,
she's 80 years old!
80-years-old woman locked
to the back of your truck
- and you're gonna kill her.
- He's not turning it off!
He knows someone's locked under!
- And then when Ted came along,
or the Unabomber,
and started, you know, killing
people that were responsible
for some of this kind of
behavior
that these kids didn't like,
I think they found somebody
that they could respect
a little bit
and could understand why
he was doing it.
The FBI
is investigating
whether the Unabomber used this
so-called ecological hitlist
to select some of his recent
victims.
The list published in 1990
in an underground newsletter
is made up of 11 companies
and organizations
that the publisher of the paper
apparently considered enemies
of the environment.
- People in the anarchist
community,
they're liking the philosophy
that they're seeing reflected
in this.
Killing innocent people walking
down lonely roads,
that's one thing.
Killing people with a
political, philosophical bent,
this had resonance.
Attention all units!
20 minutes after 2,
the calm of this sunny day
in downtown Sacramento
is shattered...
It's a terrible,
terrible bombing scene.
Let me take you
somewhere.
- It's hard to describe,
really, the effects
that such a thing has on a,
a person,
but it was,
it was really awful.
Um...
Uh, I'll reserve saying anymore
for the sake of the victim
and the victim's families,
but...
Gilbert Murray,
the president
of the California Forestry
Association,
is the third person to be
killed by the Unabomber.
- It's the Unabomber.
It's creepy and it's current
and it's from a killer
who has not been caught
for more than a decade.
- Another kind of terror -
mailbombs.
- Officials are warning
everyone to be on guard.
- The most wanted criminal
in America
is still the Unabomber.
- You have to wonder,
"Am I next?"
Is he gonna send a, you know,
a pipe bomb to the Chronicle
because we're reflecting
technology
and capitalism,
and big business?
I'm feeling every package.
Every parcel that comes in,
you check for wires,
you check for a little bit
of oil.
You smell it.
Has it got a little gunpowder
smell to it?
You press down on it.
Has it got uneven lumps
that could be the match-head
igniters?
Could be explosive loads.
You're very careful about
packages like that.
- The newsroom gets a letter
from the Unabomber
saying that he's going
to blow up an airliner
in L.A.
So, we take this thing into
the editorial office,
everyone looks at it.
We're wondering what this
next step is.
Do you print this stuff?
Are you going to be uh...
an ad paper for a killer?
We call the FBI.
They come over.
They look at it.
It's pretty quickly determined
that it's the real thing.
- Further examination
has confirmed
that this letter originates
from the Unabomber subject.
- So, do you take him seriously
or do you blow it off?
We decided to print.
- There was a suggestion by
the postal service
to simply not carry packages
anymore.
They weren't willing
to put them in airplanes.
And that added tremendously
to the already unbelievable
amount of pressure
on the task force
to solve this case.
You can't have the mail
in the United States
come to a halt.
It's almost inconceivable.
Los Angeles
International Airport
is under full alert
with security measures not seen
since the Gulf War.
- And it turns out the guy
wasn't serious.
And so, after the 4th of July
weekend comes and goes
and no one's killed,
nothing blows up,
the dogs get called off
and it goes back
to Unabomber normal.
- Everybody in the United
States, it seems,
and probably many other
countries,
is aware of and interested
in the Unabomber
and what comes next
in this story.
- In the summer of 1995,
almost every day
or every other day,
there was a little article
describing the Unabomber
and what his interests were,
and these different theories
about what we should do.
We don't want, you know,
any kind of technology,
We don't want all of this.
We have to go back to
the natural way of life,
you know, without machines
and without phones
and all of that.
It was churning up in my head
quite a bit.
And I thought, gosh, that
sounds like Dave's brother.
- I look at her and she,
she didn't look quite happy,
and I said, "Something wrong?"
- And, for a while,
I was going to hold off,
but then I did broach the topic.
- And she said, "David,
I think it might be your
brother."
And, you know, my immediate
reaction was,
Oh, well, I know
it's not my brother,
so thank goodness it's...
you know,
thank goodness it's just
a worry you have,
not something real."
- David just couldn't
believe it.
He just thought I was being
stupid, I guess,
or crazy or something.
- I mean, she really,
it was more of an intuition,
I thought, than anything.
Nothing like evidence.
- He didn't want to believe it.
And I guess that's the way um...
family members might be,
that they don't...
they don't want to believe that
about their family member.
- These are type-written
copies,
typed on the same typewriter
that's been used on most of the
other Unabomb communications.
Which we have figured out,
forensically,
is a very old L.C. Smith Corona
manual typewriter.
He sends as many copies
of the manifesto
as can be banged out
using carbon paper,
on a manual typewriter.
Five copies go out
to various locations.
- We get a copy of
the Manifesto ourselves
and I read this thing
word for word.
We realize the guy's smart.
He's not a great writer,
but he's a very competent
academic writer,
and we now have the dilemma
before us
about whether we should print
this manifesto or not.
Do we want to piss off
the author?
Do we want to serve the greater
good of journalism?
Do we want to suppress it
because it's incitive stuff
that can rile up anarchists
into action?
Or just be smart stuff
that informs the public?
- The leadership of
the task force
was given the assignment
by the FBI Director
and the Attorney General,
Director Freeh
and Director Reno,
to debate this question
and come back with
a recommendation.
- Within the bureau there was
a thought that,
you know, are we capitulating
to a bomber,
a terrorist,
by publishing his manifesto?
- I'll call it a somewhat
furious debate over this,
and everybody was not on
the same side initially.
And the decision was made
that we shouldn't publish it.
The meeting breaks up,
one of us looked at everybody
else and said,
"That was the wrong decision,
wasn't it?"
And everybody else
in there said, "Yes,
that was the wrong decision."
And the primary argument was,
if it gets published,
a document of that size,
seen by enough people,
it's almost impossible
that someone will not recognize
the author.
Either because of the way
he writes,
or because of his message.
- We figure, "This is for
the greater good."
You put out the clues and,
as a newspaper,
we are all about being
for the greater good.
So, in conjunction with
the local FBI office,
we printed the Manifesto.
It was behind
the business pages,
tucked in between the want ads,
but it was all there today,
all 35,000 words of the
Unabomber's message to America.
- We print the thing
and we get...
zillions of responses
at the time.
I think that copy of the paper
sold fairly well,
which, you know, you don't
wanna make money on horror,
but the fact that it sold well
meant that a lot of people
were reading it
and that was good. You want
people to pick, pick it over.
- I remember my first thought
was that the Unabomber had won,
at this point.
When the whole thing
was published,
I thought,
well, that's it, he won.
He defeated the federal
government and the FBI
because he got this thing
published.
- This is the original copy
of the Unabomber Manifesto.
I kept it never knowing that
I would meet the author.
It's huge,
it's an amazing document.
Like the opening sentence,
"The Industrial Revolution
and its consequences
have been a disaster
for the human race."
- "They've destabilized
society,
have made life unfulfilling,
have subjected human beings
to indignities,
have led to widespread
psychological suffering
and have inflicted severe
damage on the natural world."
- "Science marches on blindly
without regard to the welfare
of the human race."
- "The system cannot be
reformed in such a way
as to reconcile freedom
with technology.
The only way out
is to dispense with
the industrial technological
system altogether."
- "It would be better
to dump the whole stinking
system
and take the consequences."
- "We therefore advocate
a revolution
against the industrial system."
- You could take any aspect
of the technological system
and it's hard to argue
against any one aspect.
You could say, what's wrong
with a phone?
What's wrong with an email?
What's wrong with a digital
camera or something?
But if you take someone
like Kaczynski,
he looks at the ensemble,
the whole system and he says,
well, look what the system
is doing to us.
It's drawing people in,
they're getting addicted.
Mental stress is increasing,
mental illness is increasing,
physical health is decreasing,
environmental destruction
is accelerating.
This is a consequence of
the whole technological system.
It's not any one technology.
So, my cell phone
isn't destroying
the-the global ecosystem.
No, it's not the cell phone,
but it's the whole network that
goes to having and creating
and using a cellphone
on a mass basis.
That's what's destroying
the global ecosystem
and that's what's causing
human stress.
- When friends of mine
discovered
that I hadn't even read it yet,
they go,
"You're gonna love it, read it!
You're an idiot. Come on."
And I did. Uh, there wasn't
anything I disagreed with,
actually, and I still,
uh, advocate it.
I think it's just an amazingly
important document
now more than ever.
- "In order to get our message
before the public
with some chance of making
a lasting impression,
we've had to kill people."
He comes right out and says it.
The Justice
Department hopes
to use his own words
to lead investigators
to one of the most hunted men
in the country.
- I'm sure there will be a lot
of people
in the academic community
that will read this
and will say,
"Well, that sounds just like..."
and they'll flash back
to a student
or a professor that
they have worked with.
- It did ultimately lead to...
literally thousands of people
that thought that they might
know who the Unabomber was.
- This was getting
to be about mid-October.
David promised
that when the Unabomber
manifesto was published,
that he would go out
and get it.
He promised that to me.
But apparently there were only
6 copies being sold
at this newspaper shop
and they had already gone
very quickly.
- The college library had
the issue
but somebody had taken
the manifesto out of it
so it wasn't there.
And I'm, I'm ready
to throw up both of my hands
and then she...
and then she says,
"The internet!"
Now, I had hardly heard
of the internet.
We didn't have it at home,
but they had it
at the college library.
Linda's sitting next to me,
and, first of all,
it's kind of weird.
Here I am on this new-fangled
technology,
trying to figure out
if my brother
is the anti-technology
terrorist.
You know, I felt almost, like,
guilty about doing that.
- He was looking at the screen
and I was looking at his cheek
and his jaw dropped
when he read the first
few lines
of the Unabomber manifesto.
Linda kind of whispered,
"David, what do you think?
Do you think it could be Ted?"
And I said, "I have to admit,
some parts of it really do
sound like him.
If I had to, if I had to guess,
maybe there's one chance
in a thousand he wrote it."
And I was expecting,
well, maybe that would be
reassuring to her.
But she said, "David,
one chance in a thousand?
That's not nothing."
- I started to try
and talk Dave
into getting an expert
in analyzing the comparison
between Ted's letters
and the Unabomber manifesto.
That, that perhaps
there's a pattern
because it's the same author.
So, I suggested Susan Swanson,
who I knew was a private
investigator
and had connections
with this kind of thing.
- I've known Linda since
we were toddlers.
It was Linda who cracked
the Unabomber case.
She was the only one
who suspected,
just by reading his letters,
that he might be violent.
And I tried to look
to see if there were
any similarities
and, after a while,
there were times when I thought
they really could've been
written by the same person.
- "I've got to know
that every last tie
joining me to this
stinking family
has been cut forever."
- "It would be better
to dump the whole stinking
system
and take the consequences."
- I thought it was hard to tell
the difference between the two.
It kind of flowed,
it had, you know, um...
the same tone.
So, I went to work researching
the Unabomber case,
taking into account
other things Ted had
that were in common
with the Unabomber.
Probably the biggest
geographic link
had to do with universities
where bombs were found.
There were two at the
University of California,
at Berkeley,
and one at the University
of Michigan
in Ann Arbor.
We knew that Ted had gotten
his Ph.D.
at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor,
and we knew he had been a...
assistant professor
at the University of California
at Berkeley.
- We were looking at the
timeline of the bombings
and letters that we had
received from Ted.
My big hope was that we would...
find that a letter was sent
from Montana,
on a day that, say, a bomb
was sent from California.
So, I was still hopeful that
he might be ruled out.
- And, um,
what David knew was that
Ted would sometimes hitch
a ride to Helena, Montana.
And from there, he would catch
a Greyhound bus
all the way to
the San Francisco Bay area.
I made some calls to
the Greyhound bus line.
They said there's no way
you could take
the Greyhound bus
from Helena, Montana
to San Francisco, California,
without going through
Salt Lake City, Utah.
And since Salt Lake City
is one of the places
where a bomb had gone off,
that was very concerning.
- I'm actually thinking
my brother
could be the most wanted person
in America,
a serial murderer.
The cost if we were wrong
either way
was so intense.
If we did nothing
and Ted was the Unabomber,
he might strike again.
Someone would be dead.
We'd have to go through
the rest of our lives
understanding that
somebody died
because we had failed to act.
That was intolerable.
And then the other side of this
was the realization,
my God, if Ted is...
if Ted is guilty
and he's killed three people,
then he's probably gonna get
the death penalty.
What would it be like for me
to go through the rest
of my life
with my brother's blood
on my hands?
The brother I'd sworn
to never abandon.
Man, that was unthinkable.
It was like,
I was sort of in this box,
not at all of my own making
and there was like no way
to get out of it.
- For me, it was easy.
There was a possibility uh...
somewhat a pretty decent
possibility
that he was the Unabomber,
so we had to do something.
- So, David called me
and he said, you know,
that this was,
this was bad news.
- I said, "Well, we think
we need to stop the violence,
so we'd like you to contact
the FBI."
We thought everything's gonna
change,
you know, everything's gonna...
well, two or three weeks go by,
we don't hear anything.
- We are deluged
with information.
People are mailing in
writings from...
their uncles, their brothers,
their ex-boyfriends,
saying, well, this person
might be the Unabomber.
And we're trying to take it in
and process it.
There were thousands of people
who got brief looks.
There were 2,417 people
who were designated formally
as suspects.
Ted Kaczynski was number 2,416.
- But at this point,
my mother got sick.
She was in the hospital
in Chicago.
I had to fly back there,
and I found myself alone
in her house.
And, um, I realized she had
saved a bunch of letters
from my brother,
and among her letters,
I find a 23-page manuscript
which was like...
I guess you'd call it
a proto-manifesto.
It was the essence of
the manifesto
boiled down to 23 pages,
written maybe several years
earlier.
And at that point,
without hesitation,
we contacted the FBI.
- A call came into
the switchboard,
at the San Francisco office,
looking for someone
from the Unabomb Task Force.
It was from an agent
and she's read the document
and she thinks it might be
important.
All she wanted is someone
on the task force
to look at the document
before it just went into the...
great pile of okay-this-has
been-handled-and-washed-out.
So, I asked her
to send it to me.
She faxed it to me,
I looked at it,
uh, and I concluded that
the writer of this 23-page
document
and the writer of the manifesto
were the same person.
This is a huge moment.
The light is at the end of
the tunnel.
We are going to solve
this case.
We are convinced of it.
But we don't have enough
evidence to arrest him.
We can tie him very
definitively to the manifesto,
but it's ties based on...
linguistic analysis,
essentially.
That's not enough
to arrest him.
We need to get into that cabin,
we need to conduct a search
of that cabin,
and see what's in there.
That becomes the primary goal,
is getting into the cabin
by a search warrant.
We send a handful
of agents up there.
- They approached my dad
because Ted trusted him -
I mean, as much as he probably
trusted anybody -
because he'd been his neighbor
for 20-plus years.
- They were like, "What do you
know about your neighbor, Ted?"
And Butch is like,
"He's a hermit."
And they go,
"Well, we're pretty sure
he's the Unabomber."
And Butch is like, "No,
he's not the Unabomber."
And he's like, "Yeah, we,
we're pretty sure we got him.
And so would you
be willing to help us
in his arrest?"
And Butch is like,
"Well, what do you need?"
Well, my dad was asked
to video the terrain
around Ted's place.
And he went out there
and took his video camera,
held it down by his hip
and just walked the grounds
so that the FBI could have
a clear vision
of what the terrain looked like
around Ted's cabin.
My dad, Butch, was the eyes
and the ears of the operation.
- We start getting hints
before April
that the investigators
are narrowing in;
that the Manifesto
has lit a fuse
and that something's going down.
And so, we're scratching
everywhere we can.
We get clues,
some of the networks get clues.
They're trying to keep
a tight lid on it,
but it's leaking out.
- The task force
was contacted by CBS
at the beginning of April.
And CBS News indicated
that they, essentially,
had the story,
and they were going to run
with the story.
We couldn't afford
for media trucks
to be driving down that
little dirt road
and knock on his door...
for a million reasons.
So, okay, we had 24 hours
to get in place.
We flew a planeload of agents,
the entire San Francisco
SWAT team
to surround the cabin,
crawl into place
during the night,
and then all the other people
we would need
to knock on his door
the next day.
- The day of the arrest,
it was early,
it's kind of chilly,
wind was blowing.
The air was so...
I mean, the tension
was so thick
you could just feel it.
- We didn't want to have
a situation
where we had a barricaded
gunman.
We knew Ted had
at least one weapon,
a, a rifle.
the Unabomber reappears.
He's been gone a long time,
and he wants to make sure
that everyone realizes
he's back.
And the FBI says
that a letter bomb
was mailed to the home
of one this country's foremost
geneticists.
He is in critical condition
tonight in Northern California.
- It's a rather large shock.
People had gotten used
to the idea
that the Unabomber would never
be heard from again.
And all of a sudden,
he's not just back,
but he is back in a big way.
Dr. Epstein,
a genetics researcher
at the University of California
San Francisco,
has made advances in the study
of Down's Syndrome.
- And who could blame him?
He lost his eardrums
and fingers to this guy
just because he was doing
his job,
trying to help humanity.
Investigators say
they found no link
between the attack
and Epstein's work.
- As a reporter,
I talked to Epstein,
and Dr. Epstein, in particular,
was mad till the day he died,
and I don't blame him
one tiny bit.
The letter bomb
went off at 8:30 this morning
at Yale's computer science
center.
38-year-old associate professor
David Gelernter
was opening his mail
in his fifth-floor office
when the letter bomb exploded.
- So now you have two devices,
one goes to a geneticist,
the other goes to a computer
science professor
at Yale University.
The historical significance
of the case
is not lost on people.
There's been nothing like this
in FBI history.
The two attacks
this week
have raised fears
that a serial bomber
blamed for a dozen explosions
in the late '70s and '80s
may be back at work.
- Overnight,
the decision is made
to reinvigorate
the investigation
by putting a lot of resources
into it.
- They're getting thousands
of tips.
Nut cases, kinda nut cases,
people you take somewhat
seriously,
and then ones who think,
"Wow, maybe you got a point."
It's exhausting.
- We're taking in so much
information,
what if something gets past us?
That was the fear we live,
we live with all the time;
that the answer has come to us
and we've passed it by.
No. It was
simply anger and revenge
and I was...
was going to strike back.
Try not to get blown up.
Local, State,
and Federal investigators
continue to work around
the clock
collecting evidence
from the blast.
I would imagine
it would be
a relatively quick
determination from residue
that we can tell what kind
of explosive was involved.
- He's now using a chlorate
mixture that he's created
which no longer requires a pipe
to contain it.
So, it explodes on its own
once it's initiated.
- We have an announcement
of a piece of evidence
in the case
which has never been made
public before.
- The New York Times receives
a letter
from the Unabomber.
Rather short - it's a double
spaced paragraph,
not a lot of words -
claiming credit
for these bombings.
Investigators at the time
have hopes
that it will provide
some clues.
So, you have the typeface,
what kind of typewriter
wrote this?
Where did the paper come from?
Can you figure that out?
Is the paper significant
in some way?
Where it was mailed?
The type of stamps?
Is there any DNA under the flap
of the envelope?
Are there any fingerprints
on the paper
or on the envelope?
None of that,
there's none of that.
There's no good forensic
evidence.
What there is, on this letter,
is indented writing.
The sort of impressions
which are created by writing
on a surface
with a piece of paper
under that surface,
so you've left no ink marks
or pencil marks,
but you've left an indentation.
"Call Nathan R.
Wednesday, 7pm."
This is taken by
the investigators
as a mistake that
the Unabomber has made.
Finally, he has made a mistake.
- If any members of the public
know a Nathan R.
or have any idea as to who
that person might be
and in what context,
that information would be
of critical importance for us.
- We were looking for
Nathan R.'s everywhere.
It was crazy.
- All the task force has to do
is find every single one
of them,
and one of them will know
who the Unabomber is.
Because he's going to receive
a phone call,
on Wednesday at 7pm.
How hard can this be, right?
Well, it's tremendously hard.
Um...
there are a lot of people
named Nathan R.
- So, you go calling
and, you know,
you've chased down
15 different ways
of getting to a Nathan R.
Finally, you knock on the door
and the guy says,
you know, "Who are you?
I don't care. Get lost."
It's... there's a lot of that
when you're doing a story
like this.
- Every Nathan R.
that they could find,
and there are thousands
of them.
We had them all interviewed
to ask these questions.
It didn't lead to a solution.
- There's a sense that
he's fooling them.
He's eluding them.
He's toying with them
and taunting them.
- The pressure that the task
force is under
is increased by these taunts.
- Right over there
was Ted's 10 by 12 cabin.
Again, very rustic,
very simple,
just wood cabin,
no electricity,
no running water,
uh, with a green roof.
- It's a bit haunting,
every time I come back here.
I've never felt peaceful.
I mean, we're surrounded
by beautiful trees,
and the birds are chirping,
but I have never,
I would never use that word
to describe how I feel
in this spot.
Not... not peaceful.
- You know, a lot of people
that have perpetrated
a single murder,
uh, regret it for the rest
of their life
and-and will never kill again.
What makes the serial killer
so particularly fascinating
is they've gone through
the trauma of killing someone
and are addicted to it
and are ready to do it again
and again and again.
- The investigators
are picking up
that this is an anarchist
who doesn't like environmental
decimation,
doesn't like people
who-who shill
for anti-environmentalist
causes.
Investigators say
it was a package
sent through the mail
about the size of a home video
cassette.
It killed 50-year-old
Thomas Mosser,
a senior advertising executive
at one of the largest
ad agencies in the world.
- He opens it in his kitchen,
where his wife and young
daughter had been
standing next to him
just moments before,
uh, and he's killed instantly
by the very significant blast
at this point.
- We are all today determined
to end the death
and destruction
that these random bombings
have wrought.
- The pressure to solve it
is immense.
Desperate is perhaps a...
a fair word at that point.
- Unabomb hotline.
So far thousands
of tips
phoned into the San Francisco
Unabomb Taskforce
have led nowhere.
And a one-million-dollar reward
hasn't helped either.
- The phones are ringing
constantly.
We are getting thousands
of calls from the public.
We don't watch TV much.
Um, the first time I ever heard
the term "Unabomber"
was in December of 1994,
when the front page
of our newspaper
said that the Unabomber,
whoever that was,
had struck again and killed
an advertising executive
by the name of Thomas Mosser
in New Jersey.
But I'd never heard the term
before.
- Ted came down here once,
didn't he?
- No.
- He never came here.
- No, I remember him once
planning to come.
He even told me he had
a bus ticket
and that he was going
to arrive on a certain day,
and then he decided not
to come,
and he said he had too much
to do.
And of course, I'm thinking,
too much to do?
I mean, come on, Ted.
What do you have to do?
And of course, at that time,
I didn't know how...
what he meant.
- He and I had never met.
I have still never met him.
I have never, as far as I know,
talked to him over the phone
or anything like that.
He didn't like me.
He didn't want David
to marry me.
He was really furious,
I guess, about the wedding
and, of course, he didn't come.
And he wrote a letter
that was very...
very aggressive.
Oh, it was really awful.
I had never met the guy
and nobody could understand
why Ted was threatening
to break connection with Dave.
Every time David and his mother
got together,
they sat there for hours
talking about Ted.
His mother was very worried
about it
because Ted had cut
relationships to his mother.
So that's how I began
to pick up the sense
that he was... unusual,
and perhaps mentally...
you know, different.
- Linda was the first one
to tell me.
Reading some of my brother's
letters,
hearing family conversation,
she says, "David, your
brother's mentally ill,
you know that, don't you?"
And I said, "Wait a second, you
don't really understand him.
He's a genius, he's different.
He's ba-blah-blah..."
"David, look at this,
people who are healthy
in their minds
don't think like this."
- His basic argument is that
technology is a system
that we really cannot control.
It's causing harm to people
and the environment.
The stresses will increase
on humans and on nature,
and there's no way to modify
or to reform the system
so as to avoid these negative
outcomes.
His conclusion is the system
has to be brought to an end.
We have to have a kind of
revolution against the system,
and to stop it
before it can uh...
lead to these catastrophic
outcomes.
- In 1995, the Unabomber
sends another letter
to the New York Times.
It's three pages of single
spaced typewriting.
It takes credit
for the bombing of
Thomas Mosser,
and he is indicating
that this will continue
"unless".
There's now a, a deal
that's being offered.
The bomber says
he'll desist
from terrorist activities
only if major publications
print a manuscript
advocating the destruction
of the worldwide industrial
system.
- He says the written document
that he wants published
will be coming forth shortly.
The so-called
Unabomber has now spoken out
and taunted the FBI,
calling it a joke.
- In the letter he refers
to the FBI as a joke.
This is somewhat echoing
sentiments
that are coming from political
and media and public circles.
He apparently has jumped on
that bandwagon as well.
The mysterious
Unabomber is claiming
to be part of a group,
quote "The FBI has tried to
portray these bombings
as the work of an isolated nut.
We won't waste our time arguing
about whether we are nuts,
but we certainly are not
isolated."
- He claims to be a group
called "FC"
and he's always very clear
to make sure that his bombs
contain FC
somewhere in there
where the FC will be found
stamped onto a piece of metal,
or etched onto a piece
of metal,
in other words,
intended to survive.
The Unabomber suggested
that part of his motivation
had to do with concerns
about the environment
to try to portray himself as,
perhaps,
some sort of environmental
crusader.
Around the same time,
there were environmental groups
which advocated radical
solutions
to their concerns.
So, it was somewhat
of a logical extension
that he get the task force
to consider
that perhaps he was associated
with groups like that.
- Because there was always this
idea of FC
and the Freedom Club,
I think that the Feds believed
that there were more people
involved
than Kaczynski himself.
And so, they were really
interested
in letting me in there
and letting us talk freely
so that they could gauge
whether or not
Kaczynski was connected
in any way
to any of us in Earth First!
- Earth First! has been
an organization,
from its beginning,
that has been dedicated
to action.
Everything from,
you know, tree sitting,
and other types of
monkeywrenching,
and had been under suspicion
of being tied to radical
environmental terrorism.
- Yeah, the '90s was a trip.
Soon had this slow progression
of radicalism.
And for me,
I noticed it up at a...
the mountains east of town,
and the Earth Firsters were
trying to protect
this forest up there,
which they did.
And these Earth Firsters
created a, a blockade
to prevent loggers
from coming in,
and they won.
In the eyes of
the forest service,
this is destruction of
government property,
a federal offence,
and some critics are even
calling these protesters
domestic terrorists.
Don't move your truck!
Shut your truck off, man!
There's an old woman,
she's 80 years old!
80-years-old woman locked
to the back of your truck
- and you're gonna kill her.
- He's not turning it off!
He knows someone's locked under!
- And then when Ted came along,
or the Unabomber,
and started, you know, killing
people that were responsible
for some of this kind of
behavior
that these kids didn't like,
I think they found somebody
that they could respect
a little bit
and could understand why
he was doing it.
The FBI
is investigating
whether the Unabomber used this
so-called ecological hitlist
to select some of his recent
victims.
The list published in 1990
in an underground newsletter
is made up of 11 companies
and organizations
that the publisher of the paper
apparently considered enemies
of the environment.
- People in the anarchist
community,
they're liking the philosophy
that they're seeing reflected
in this.
Killing innocent people walking
down lonely roads,
that's one thing.
Killing people with a
political, philosophical bent,
this had resonance.
Attention all units!
20 minutes after 2,
the calm of this sunny day
in downtown Sacramento
is shattered...
It's a terrible,
terrible bombing scene.
Let me take you
somewhere.
- It's hard to describe,
really, the effects
that such a thing has on a,
a person,
but it was,
it was really awful.
Um...
Uh, I'll reserve saying anymore
for the sake of the victim
and the victim's families,
but...
Gilbert Murray,
the president
of the California Forestry
Association,
is the third person to be
killed by the Unabomber.
- It's the Unabomber.
It's creepy and it's current
and it's from a killer
who has not been caught
for more than a decade.
- Another kind of terror -
mailbombs.
- Officials are warning
everyone to be on guard.
- The most wanted criminal
in America
is still the Unabomber.
- You have to wonder,
"Am I next?"
Is he gonna send a, you know,
a pipe bomb to the Chronicle
because we're reflecting
technology
and capitalism,
and big business?
I'm feeling every package.
Every parcel that comes in,
you check for wires,
you check for a little bit
of oil.
You smell it.
Has it got a little gunpowder
smell to it?
You press down on it.
Has it got uneven lumps
that could be the match-head
igniters?
Could be explosive loads.
You're very careful about
packages like that.
- The newsroom gets a letter
from the Unabomber
saying that he's going
to blow up an airliner
in L.A.
So, we take this thing into
the editorial office,
everyone looks at it.
We're wondering what this
next step is.
Do you print this stuff?
Are you going to be uh...
an ad paper for a killer?
We call the FBI.
They come over.
They look at it.
It's pretty quickly determined
that it's the real thing.
- Further examination
has confirmed
that this letter originates
from the Unabomber subject.
- So, do you take him seriously
or do you blow it off?
We decided to print.
- There was a suggestion by
the postal service
to simply not carry packages
anymore.
They weren't willing
to put them in airplanes.
And that added tremendously
to the already unbelievable
amount of pressure
on the task force
to solve this case.
You can't have the mail
in the United States
come to a halt.
It's almost inconceivable.
Los Angeles
International Airport
is under full alert
with security measures not seen
since the Gulf War.
- And it turns out the guy
wasn't serious.
And so, after the 4th of July
weekend comes and goes
and no one's killed,
nothing blows up,
the dogs get called off
and it goes back
to Unabomber normal.
- Everybody in the United
States, it seems,
and probably many other
countries,
is aware of and interested
in the Unabomber
and what comes next
in this story.
- In the summer of 1995,
almost every day
or every other day,
there was a little article
describing the Unabomber
and what his interests were,
and these different theories
about what we should do.
We don't want, you know,
any kind of technology,
We don't want all of this.
We have to go back to
the natural way of life,
you know, without machines
and without phones
and all of that.
It was churning up in my head
quite a bit.
And I thought, gosh, that
sounds like Dave's brother.
- I look at her and she,
she didn't look quite happy,
and I said, "Something wrong?"
- And, for a while,
I was going to hold off,
but then I did broach the topic.
- And she said, "David,
I think it might be your
brother."
And, you know, my immediate
reaction was,
Oh, well, I know
it's not my brother,
so thank goodness it's...
you know,
thank goodness it's just
a worry you have,
not something real."
- David just couldn't
believe it.
He just thought I was being
stupid, I guess,
or crazy or something.
- I mean, she really,
it was more of an intuition,
I thought, than anything.
Nothing like evidence.
- He didn't want to believe it.
And I guess that's the way um...
family members might be,
that they don't...
they don't want to believe that
about their family member.
- These are type-written
copies,
typed on the same typewriter
that's been used on most of the
other Unabomb communications.
Which we have figured out,
forensically,
is a very old L.C. Smith Corona
manual typewriter.
He sends as many copies
of the manifesto
as can be banged out
using carbon paper,
on a manual typewriter.
Five copies go out
to various locations.
- We get a copy of
the Manifesto ourselves
and I read this thing
word for word.
We realize the guy's smart.
He's not a great writer,
but he's a very competent
academic writer,
and we now have the dilemma
before us
about whether we should print
this manifesto or not.
Do we want to piss off
the author?
Do we want to serve the greater
good of journalism?
Do we want to suppress it
because it's incitive stuff
that can rile up anarchists
into action?
Or just be smart stuff
that informs the public?
- The leadership of
the task force
was given the assignment
by the FBI Director
and the Attorney General,
Director Freeh
and Director Reno,
to debate this question
and come back with
a recommendation.
- Within the bureau there was
a thought that,
you know, are we capitulating
to a bomber,
a terrorist,
by publishing his manifesto?
- I'll call it a somewhat
furious debate over this,
and everybody was not on
the same side initially.
And the decision was made
that we shouldn't publish it.
The meeting breaks up,
one of us looked at everybody
else and said,
"That was the wrong decision,
wasn't it?"
And everybody else
in there said, "Yes,
that was the wrong decision."
And the primary argument was,
if it gets published,
a document of that size,
seen by enough people,
it's almost impossible
that someone will not recognize
the author.
Either because of the way
he writes,
or because of his message.
- We figure, "This is for
the greater good."
You put out the clues and,
as a newspaper,
we are all about being
for the greater good.
So, in conjunction with
the local FBI office,
we printed the Manifesto.
It was behind
the business pages,
tucked in between the want ads,
but it was all there today,
all 35,000 words of the
Unabomber's message to America.
- We print the thing
and we get...
zillions of responses
at the time.
I think that copy of the paper
sold fairly well,
which, you know, you don't
wanna make money on horror,
but the fact that it sold well
meant that a lot of people
were reading it
and that was good. You want
people to pick, pick it over.
- I remember my first thought
was that the Unabomber had won,
at this point.
When the whole thing
was published,
I thought,
well, that's it, he won.
He defeated the federal
government and the FBI
because he got this thing
published.
- This is the original copy
of the Unabomber Manifesto.
I kept it never knowing that
I would meet the author.
It's huge,
it's an amazing document.
Like the opening sentence,
"The Industrial Revolution
and its consequences
have been a disaster
for the human race."
- "They've destabilized
society,
have made life unfulfilling,
have subjected human beings
to indignities,
have led to widespread
psychological suffering
and have inflicted severe
damage on the natural world."
- "Science marches on blindly
without regard to the welfare
of the human race."
- "The system cannot be
reformed in such a way
as to reconcile freedom
with technology.
The only way out
is to dispense with
the industrial technological
system altogether."
- "It would be better
to dump the whole stinking
system
and take the consequences."
- "We therefore advocate
a revolution
against the industrial system."
- You could take any aspect
of the technological system
and it's hard to argue
against any one aspect.
You could say, what's wrong
with a phone?
What's wrong with an email?
What's wrong with a digital
camera or something?
But if you take someone
like Kaczynski,
he looks at the ensemble,
the whole system and he says,
well, look what the system
is doing to us.
It's drawing people in,
they're getting addicted.
Mental stress is increasing,
mental illness is increasing,
physical health is decreasing,
environmental destruction
is accelerating.
This is a consequence of
the whole technological system.
It's not any one technology.
So, my cell phone
isn't destroying
the-the global ecosystem.
No, it's not the cell phone,
but it's the whole network that
goes to having and creating
and using a cellphone
on a mass basis.
That's what's destroying
the global ecosystem
and that's what's causing
human stress.
- When friends of mine
discovered
that I hadn't even read it yet,
they go,
"You're gonna love it, read it!
You're an idiot. Come on."
And I did. Uh, there wasn't
anything I disagreed with,
actually, and I still,
uh, advocate it.
I think it's just an amazingly
important document
now more than ever.
- "In order to get our message
before the public
with some chance of making
a lasting impression,
we've had to kill people."
He comes right out and says it.
The Justice
Department hopes
to use his own words
to lead investigators
to one of the most hunted men
in the country.
- I'm sure there will be a lot
of people
in the academic community
that will read this
and will say,
"Well, that sounds just like..."
and they'll flash back
to a student
or a professor that
they have worked with.
- It did ultimately lead to...
literally thousands of people
that thought that they might
know who the Unabomber was.
- This was getting
to be about mid-October.
David promised
that when the Unabomber
manifesto was published,
that he would go out
and get it.
He promised that to me.
But apparently there were only
6 copies being sold
at this newspaper shop
and they had already gone
very quickly.
- The college library had
the issue
but somebody had taken
the manifesto out of it
so it wasn't there.
And I'm, I'm ready
to throw up both of my hands
and then she...
and then she says,
"The internet!"
Now, I had hardly heard
of the internet.
We didn't have it at home,
but they had it
at the college library.
Linda's sitting next to me,
and, first of all,
it's kind of weird.
Here I am on this new-fangled
technology,
trying to figure out
if my brother
is the anti-technology
terrorist.
You know, I felt almost, like,
guilty about doing that.
- He was looking at the screen
and I was looking at his cheek
and his jaw dropped
when he read the first
few lines
of the Unabomber manifesto.
Linda kind of whispered,
"David, what do you think?
Do you think it could be Ted?"
And I said, "I have to admit,
some parts of it really do
sound like him.
If I had to, if I had to guess,
maybe there's one chance
in a thousand he wrote it."
And I was expecting,
well, maybe that would be
reassuring to her.
But she said, "David,
one chance in a thousand?
That's not nothing."
- I started to try
and talk Dave
into getting an expert
in analyzing the comparison
between Ted's letters
and the Unabomber manifesto.
That, that perhaps
there's a pattern
because it's the same author.
So, I suggested Susan Swanson,
who I knew was a private
investigator
and had connections
with this kind of thing.
- I've known Linda since
we were toddlers.
It was Linda who cracked
the Unabomber case.
She was the only one
who suspected,
just by reading his letters,
that he might be violent.
And I tried to look
to see if there were
any similarities
and, after a while,
there were times when I thought
they really could've been
written by the same person.
- "I've got to know
that every last tie
joining me to this
stinking family
has been cut forever."
- "It would be better
to dump the whole stinking
system
and take the consequences."
- I thought it was hard to tell
the difference between the two.
It kind of flowed,
it had, you know, um...
the same tone.
So, I went to work researching
the Unabomber case,
taking into account
other things Ted had
that were in common
with the Unabomber.
Probably the biggest
geographic link
had to do with universities
where bombs were found.
There were two at the
University of California,
at Berkeley,
and one at the University
of Michigan
in Ann Arbor.
We knew that Ted had gotten
his Ph.D.
at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor,
and we knew he had been a...
assistant professor
at the University of California
at Berkeley.
- We were looking at the
timeline of the bombings
and letters that we had
received from Ted.
My big hope was that we would...
find that a letter was sent
from Montana,
on a day that, say, a bomb
was sent from California.
So, I was still hopeful that
he might be ruled out.
- And, um,
what David knew was that
Ted would sometimes hitch
a ride to Helena, Montana.
And from there, he would catch
a Greyhound bus
all the way to
the San Francisco Bay area.
I made some calls to
the Greyhound bus line.
They said there's no way
you could take
the Greyhound bus
from Helena, Montana
to San Francisco, California,
without going through
Salt Lake City, Utah.
And since Salt Lake City
is one of the places
where a bomb had gone off,
that was very concerning.
- I'm actually thinking
my brother
could be the most wanted person
in America,
a serial murderer.
The cost if we were wrong
either way
was so intense.
If we did nothing
and Ted was the Unabomber,
he might strike again.
Someone would be dead.
We'd have to go through
the rest of our lives
understanding that
somebody died
because we had failed to act.
That was intolerable.
And then the other side of this
was the realization,
my God, if Ted is...
if Ted is guilty
and he's killed three people,
then he's probably gonna get
the death penalty.
What would it be like for me
to go through the rest
of my life
with my brother's blood
on my hands?
The brother I'd sworn
to never abandon.
Man, that was unthinkable.
It was like,
I was sort of in this box,
not at all of my own making
and there was like no way
to get out of it.
- For me, it was easy.
There was a possibility uh...
somewhat a pretty decent
possibility
that he was the Unabomber,
so we had to do something.
- So, David called me
and he said, you know,
that this was,
this was bad news.
- I said, "Well, we think
we need to stop the violence,
so we'd like you to contact
the FBI."
We thought everything's gonna
change,
you know, everything's gonna...
well, two or three weeks go by,
we don't hear anything.
- We are deluged
with information.
People are mailing in
writings from...
their uncles, their brothers,
their ex-boyfriends,
saying, well, this person
might be the Unabomber.
And we're trying to take it in
and process it.
There were thousands of people
who got brief looks.
There were 2,417 people
who were designated formally
as suspects.
Ted Kaczynski was number 2,416.
- But at this point,
my mother got sick.
She was in the hospital
in Chicago.
I had to fly back there,
and I found myself alone
in her house.
And, um, I realized she had
saved a bunch of letters
from my brother,
and among her letters,
I find a 23-page manuscript
which was like...
I guess you'd call it
a proto-manifesto.
It was the essence of
the manifesto
boiled down to 23 pages,
written maybe several years
earlier.
And at that point,
without hesitation,
we contacted the FBI.
- A call came into
the switchboard,
at the San Francisco office,
looking for someone
from the Unabomb Task Force.
It was from an agent
and she's read the document
and she thinks it might be
important.
All she wanted is someone
on the task force
to look at the document
before it just went into the...
great pile of okay-this-has
been-handled-and-washed-out.
So, I asked her
to send it to me.
She faxed it to me,
I looked at it,
uh, and I concluded that
the writer of this 23-page
document
and the writer of the manifesto
were the same person.
This is a huge moment.
The light is at the end of
the tunnel.
We are going to solve
this case.
We are convinced of it.
But we don't have enough
evidence to arrest him.
We can tie him very
definitively to the manifesto,
but it's ties based on...
linguistic analysis,
essentially.
That's not enough
to arrest him.
We need to get into that cabin,
we need to conduct a search
of that cabin,
and see what's in there.
That becomes the primary goal,
is getting into the cabin
by a search warrant.
We send a handful
of agents up there.
- They approached my dad
because Ted trusted him -
I mean, as much as he probably
trusted anybody -
because he'd been his neighbor
for 20-plus years.
- They were like, "What do you
know about your neighbor, Ted?"
And Butch is like,
"He's a hermit."
And they go,
"Well, we're pretty sure
he's the Unabomber."
And Butch is like, "No,
he's not the Unabomber."
And he's like, "Yeah, we,
we're pretty sure we got him.
And so would you
be willing to help us
in his arrest?"
And Butch is like,
"Well, what do you need?"
Well, my dad was asked
to video the terrain
around Ted's place.
And he went out there
and took his video camera,
held it down by his hip
and just walked the grounds
so that the FBI could have
a clear vision
of what the terrain looked like
around Ted's cabin.
My dad, Butch, was the eyes
and the ears of the operation.
- We start getting hints
before April
that the investigators
are narrowing in;
that the Manifesto
has lit a fuse
and that something's going down.
And so, we're scratching
everywhere we can.
We get clues,
some of the networks get clues.
They're trying to keep
a tight lid on it,
but it's leaking out.
- The task force
was contacted by CBS
at the beginning of April.
And CBS News indicated
that they, essentially,
had the story,
and they were going to run
with the story.
We couldn't afford
for media trucks
to be driving down that
little dirt road
and knock on his door...
for a million reasons.
So, okay, we had 24 hours
to get in place.
We flew a planeload of agents,
the entire San Francisco
SWAT team
to surround the cabin,
crawl into place
during the night,
and then all the other people
we would need
to knock on his door
the next day.
- The day of the arrest,
it was early,
it's kind of chilly,
wind was blowing.
The air was so...
I mean, the tension
was so thick
you could just feel it.
- We didn't want to have
a situation
where we had a barricaded
gunman.
We knew Ted had
at least one weapon,
a, a rifle.