Math Professor Held As Suspected Unabomber
HELENA, Mont (AP) — A former Berkeley math professor who lived like a hermit in a mountain shack was in jail today, suspected in the deadly Unabomber attacks that have baffled authorities for 18 years.
Ted John Kaczynski, 53, was taken into custody by federal agents Wednesday so they could search bis wilderness cabin 50 miles northwest of here. He was not immediately placed under arrest or charged.
Agents found explosive chemicals and bomb-making materials in the cabin, and authorities planned to charge Kaczynski today in the string of mail bombings, The New York Times reported today.
The Unabomber is thought to be responsible for three deaths’ and 23 injuries since 1978. The FBI gave the case the code name “Unabom” because early targets were universities and airlines.
The bearded, long-haired suspect wore torn black jeans and a black shirt as be was taken in handcuffs to an FBI office in Helena and transferred late Wednesday night to the nearby county jail.
FBI agents had been staking out Kaczynski’a band-built cabin near the Continental Divide for several weeks, ever since relatives in the Chicago area notified authorities that they had stumbled across some of bis old writings and found them similar to the Unabomber’s anarchist manifestoes.
A former assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, Kaczynski graduated from Harvard when be was barely 20, and received a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan several years later. Academic-oriented and obsessed with technology, he fits the FBI profile of the suspect
The cabin, with no electricity or plumbing, had been Kaczynksi’s home for about a dozen years. Neighbors said he was a loner and a recluse, going everywhere on foot or on an old bicycle.
After retreating from academic life in the 1970s, Kaczynski lived in Utah, doing odd jobs and menial labor.
Dale Eickelman, who went to junior high school with Kaczynski in the quiet, working-class Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, III., said even as a teenager, “Ted had the know-how of putting together things like batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever, and creating explosions.
“We would go to the hardware store, use household products and make these things you might call bombs,” Eickelman, now a Dartmouth anthropology professor, told the Daily Southtown in Chicago. “Once we created an explosion in a metal garbage can.”
The Unabomber’s spree began at Northwestern University, in suburban Chicago in May 1978. The most recent of 16 attacks came April 24, 1995, when a timber industry executive was killed in Sacramento, Calif.
The FBI has spread copies of the Unabomber’s writings throughout the academic community in hopes of finding someone who recognizes the work.
Last September, The New York Times and The Washington Post published, in the Post, his 35,000-word treatise on the inhumanity of industrial society. His manifesto held that industrial society should be abolished and replaced with “small, autonomous units” of no more than 100 people.
He promised to stop planting bombs that kill people if the treatise was published. There have been no bombings since.
Federal agents working the Unabomber case “have been hot to trot for about two weeks,” said Salt Lake-Police Sgt. Don Bell, a member of the multi-agency Unabom task force.
TED J. KACZYNSKI
Prime Unabomber Suspect