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CHAPTER 1
On the afternoon of April 24, 1995, a sunny Monday, a strange package arrived at the California Forestry Association's headquarters in Sacramento. It was the size of a shoebox, wrapped in plain brown paper, and heavy. Workers gathered around the parcel, which sat on a desk, and looked it over. A scientist who worked in the office lifted the box, gave it a shake.
"It's heavy enough to be a bomb," he joked.
Gilbert Murray, the association's president, chuckled along with his co-worker. Murray was a handsome, balding man with a boyish smile. Friends called him Gil. His organization promoted the timber industry, which cut down trees to build things like houses and furniture. Many environmentalists cursed loggers for cutting down too many trees, sometimes turning forestland into stumps. But Murray could scarcely imagine any of them being so angry that they would mail a bomb to his office. Still, when a pregnant co-worker began to cut into the paper with scissors, Murray stopped her.
"Let me do that for you," he said.
Murray carried the package to his office and placed it on the desk. It was addressed to William Dennison, the association's former president. Murray figured the contents of the parcel were intended for his organization, not Dennison, who had retired a year earlier. He stood hunched over the package and began to cut through the strong tape. His work revealed a wooden box, which he began to open.
It would be the last thing he ever saw.
A deafening explosion shook the office, a blast so powerful it shattered windows and shot pieces of furniture sixty feet across the office. Two doors in the office hurtled off their hinges. The noise sent workers racing out of the building. They gathered outside, ears still ringing, as black smoke poured from the one-story brick building. They smelled chemicals. Murray's panicked co-workers knew he was still in the building.
"Gil!" one woman shrieked. "Gil!"
No response.
By lifting the box's lid, Murray had triggered a bomb tucked neatly inside.
* * *
Dick Ross, special agent in charge of the FBI's Sacramento office, raced to the California Forestry Association and stalked into Murray's office before police could close down the crime scene with yellow tape. Ross's eyes roved from Murray's corpse, which lay on the floor, to fragments of bomb parts and pooled and splattered blood. He was looking for clues. Ross saw in the wreckage the work of a mysterious bomber who had terrorized America for nearly seventeen years.
The culprit had now mailed or secretly hand delivered sixteen bombs from 1978 until that spring day in 1995. Fourteen had exploded, leaving three people dead and twenty-three injured. Most of the bomber's targets had connections to universities or airlines. The FBI code-named its case UNABOM, short for UNiversity, Airline, BOMbing. Agents on the UNABOM Task Force, along with news reporters and the public, called the mysterious killer the "Unabomber."
Ross was shaken by the scene inside the California Forestry Association building, just ten blocks from his own office. Yet he was all business when he phoned the FBI's San Francisco Field Office. He reached Terry D. Turchie, who supervised the team.
"Terry," he said. "We've had a bombing up here. Everything about it looks like UNABOM. I've closed down the scene."
The first agent out the door was Pat Webb, a bomb expert. He hopped into the driver's seat of his brand-new FBI car, flipped on its flashing emergency lights, and gunned the engine. Webb reached Sacramento, more than eighty miles northeast of his San Francisco office, in record time. At 5:30 that evening, he entered the crime scene, where Gil Murray's body remained on the floor. Webb observed brown paper glued to pieces of the wooden box, batteries stripped of wrappers and covered in tape, and other familiar bomb parts. All were Unabomber trademarks.
Webb walked outside and took a seat on the curb. He phoned Turchie in San Francisco and delivered the cold facts: "Terry, this is a UNABOM event." But it was more than that. The Unabomber's newest explosive was more powerful than any of his previous bombs.
* * *
The UNABOM Task Force spent days bagging and tagging bomb parts and other evidence. Agents shipped them to the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. They hoped the bureau's forensic analysts could find a fiber or a fingerprint — anything they could link to the bomber.
Agents also hoped the killer would claim responsibility for the latest crime. He had grown bolder in his recent attacks, mailing letters to newspapers in which he bragged about his bombings and taunted the FBI. He identified himself as a terrorist group called "FC."
On the very day Murray died, The New York Times received a long, typewritten letter. "The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut," the Unabomber wrote. "We won't waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts. … Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke."
CHAPTER 2
Special Agent Kathleen M. Puckett was sickened by the latest mail-bomb murder. Puckett, whose FBI colleagues called her Kathy, had joined the UNABOM Task Force the previous fall. During her first few months in the assignment, the bomber killed twice. The first of those bombings, in December 1994, killed an advertising executive in the kitchen of his New Jersey home. Then came the bomb that took Murray's life.
Puckett and other members of the task force were certain they could catch the killer.
"The case was solvable," Puckett recalled years later, "because the killer was a human being." She knew Turchie, her boss, felt the same way. He was the soul of the investigation, cheering on agents wearied by long hours on the job. Puckett and Turchie felt uncommonly driven to catch the killer, who seemed equally driven to keep killing.
Turchie and Puckett had known each other for years. They had worked together to prevent spies for the Soviet Union, America's biggest enemy, from stealing U.S. secrets. Turchie had been impressed by Puckett's instincts and creative thinking. He had recruited her onto the UNABOM Task Force in hopes she could draw up a behavioral profile of the killer. He knew that getting inside the bomber's mind might pave the way to catching him.
Puckett's best evidence was in the letters the killer had mailed to newspapers, professors, and even one of his victims without betraying his real identity. Puckett pored over those letters. Each word offered a potential clue about the bomber. She came to believe that "FC" was most likely just one person — someone smart, highly educated, and working alone. She also believed it was a man, because all of America's most notorious bombers had been males.
The FBI Laboratory, which studied the evidence from the bomb site, came back with bad news for the investigators: The killer had left no physical evidence. Not a fingerprint. Not even a trace of sweat. Now it was up to Puckett to study the bomber's latest note to The New York Times. Catching the killer without knowing who wrote the letter would be a monumental feat. Still, she believed his words could help her shape a behavioral profile that might help to identify him.
What she couldn't possibly know was the unique role she would play in unmasking the Unabomber.
* * *
Nothing in Puckett's early life suggested a career in the FBI. She was born in 1950, a time when women were not even allowed to serve as agents. She went to high school and college in Southern California during the 1960s. It was a place and time in which people her age were protesting the Vietnam War and mocking the U.S. government — including the FBI — and young Kathy Puckett had been one of them. She studied history and anthropology — subjects not likely to impress FBI recruiters.
Puckett traveled across Europe after college and joined the air force in 1973. The military was a smart career choice for women back then — one of only a few jobs that paid men and women equally. She was recruited into the Office of Special Investigations, which protects the U.S. military from spies and terrorists. The Air Force sent her to Seattle, Washington, where she worked in counterintelligence, a field that prevents spying by foreign enemies. Her most important duty was preventing Soviet spies from stealing secrets from U.S. Navy submarine bases. Puckett's hard work helped earn her a promotion to captain.
Her talent caught the attention of the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (better known as the CIA), both of which tried to recruit her. She had worked with FBI agents during her air force years, but the bureau was a no-frills organization. FBI recruiters didn't wine and dine her. They just told her where the entrance exam would be given and what time to be there. CIA recruiters took a different approach. They flew her around the country, bought her nice meals. They offered her the chance to go to Greece as a covert operator — a real, live American spy. While Puckett was thrilled to be courted by the agency, choosing to become a professional spy was a major decision. She would not be allowed to tell people what she did for a living. This meant she would have to lie to the people she loved most — even her parents.
The CIA and FBI offered Puckett jobs. She made her choice in the middle of 1978, and reported for training at the FBI Academy. In a remarkable coincidence, Puckett entered duty with the FBI on May 21, 1978, just five days before the Unabomber's first bomb went off.
Puckett slogged through hard physical training at the FBI Academy, which sits on a sprawling Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. She was a tall Californian — a shade under five foot ten — with suntanned cheeks and a head full of long blond hair. But she was not a natural athlete; Puckett forced herself to run on hot, muggy days in spite of painful shin splints. She sailed right through her classroom work, mostly legal training, and surprised herself by scoring high marks at the firing range. She found it satisfying to beat burly SWAT team members at skeet shooting. Puckett and another woman in her class were among the first 130 women ever allowed to serve as FBI agents.
Once she got into decent shape, one of the men in her class pulled her aside. "Well," he said, "if we have to have women agents, Kathy, I think that you're the kind we need." His comment was supposed to be a compliment, but it wasn't. Puckett didn't want to be respected as a female agent. She wanted respect as an agent.
Her day would come.
CHAPTER 3
Kathy Puckett's 1994 entrance onto the UNABOM investigation, which had been going on for about fifteen years, made her a newcomer to the case. So it was clear to her that she had to bone up on the bombings. It was important to walk where the bomber had walked, see what he'd seen. Soon she got the chance.
Puckett's time on the task force began with what might be called a creepy field trip. She and other agents traveled to Chicago to look at the scene of the Unabomber's first attack. Puckett found herself transported to a time when the president was Jimmy Carter, NASA announced its first women astronauts, and the first Star Wars movie was still a hit.
On the trip, Puckett learned that the Unabomber's first bomb had been a mistake. He had attempted to mail his package in Chicago in May 1978. But he discovered that it was too big to fit through the slot of a mailbox, so he left it in a parking lot. A woman who found the package saw that the sender was listed as Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist Jr., so she arranged to get it to him.
Crist took one look at the package and knew something was wrong. Someone had written his name as the sender — and it wasn't him. The professor summoned a campus security officer, who opened the package. Suddenly an explosion rocked the room, leaving the officer dazed, his ears ringing. He survived the bombing, and the professor was unhurt.
Puckett analyzed that bombing from all angles. The bomber had come and gone from Chicago with ease. He'd left a package on the ground and gotten away unnoticed. Puckett told her colleagues on the UNABOM Task Force that she believed the bomber had once lived in Chicago. In time, they would learn she was right.
A year after the first bombing, a graduate student at Northwestern opened a package that held a cigar box wrapped in red polka-dot paper, detonating a bomb that left him bloody and burned. While the first two explosives were certainly traumatizing to the people who opened them, the bombs themselves had been minor, no more powerful than large firecrackers. Agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives since 2003) investigated both bombings, but they could identify no suspects.
Then the Unabomber struck again, this time on a much larger scale.
On the cool, gray morning of November 15, 1979, American Airlines Flight 444 from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport had begun its ascent toward Washington, D.C., when the Boeing 727 jetliner suddenly shook violently. Passengers later felt intense heat beneath their feet. Then, as the crew prepared to land, black smoke poured out of the air-conditioning vents, fogging the pilots' instrument panel and filling the main cabin. Oxygen masks dropped in front of the seventy-eight people aboard. Pilots made an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport, where rescuers treated twelve people for smoke inhalation.
A fire in the cargo hold of the aircraft had caused the heat and smoke. Had that blaze grown and reached the jetliner's fuel lines, the aircraft would have become a flying inferno. Everyone on board would have died.
The FBI, which investigates attacks on American aircraft, sent bomb experts to pick through the charred cargo hold of Flight 444. They found remnants of a mail bomb built into a cottonwood box. They also found a one-dollar Eugene O'Neill stamp on the package — identical to those used in the first Unabomber attack. The bomb loaded onto Flight 444 had been equipped with a makeshift device, fashioned from a barometer, which sensed how high the plane climbed or dropped. The bomber rigged the device so it would set off the explosive when the aircraft climbed to two thousand feet.
The bomb's explosive ingredients included powders removed from rifle cartridges. The builder of the device used tape, nails, screws, and solder. Agents would look for such parts — known as a bomb maker's "signature"— in future attacks.
In early June 1980, United Airlines President Percy A. Wood received a package covered in brown paper at his stately home in Lake Forest, Illinois. Inside he found a copy of the book Ice Brothers. When he opened it, he heard an ear-piercing blast and felt his skin searing as if he had fallen into a fire. A pipe bomb tucked into the hollowed-out pages of the novel left Wood with cuts and burns over most of his face and body.
The Wood bombing marked the fourth mysterious explosion in just two years. FBI forensic experts examined bomb parts from both Northwestern University explosions, the Flight 444 fire, and Percy Wood's home. They decided one person was probably behind all four. So the FBI's Chicago office took over the investigation as a serial bombing case. Agents interviewed victims of all the attacks to see if they had any mutual enemies. They found no connections between them. But they did find one curious piece of evidence. After agents carefully collected pieces of the bomb parts from Wood's home, they found a small metal tag stamped with the letters "FC." Agents had no clue what the letters stood for. Not yet.
As Puckett and her fellow agents studied those years-old case files and traveled to scenes of the UNABOM attacks, one thing became clear: The bomber had changed, and so had his explosives. He and his bombs had grown ever more dangerous.
The Unabomber struck six more times from 1981 to 1985. Explosions burned a secretary at Vanderbilt University and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, a graduate student at Berkeley picked up a beige plastic box, triggering a blast that blew four fingers off his hand, shot his college ring into a wall, and dashed his dreams of becoming an astronaut. Another explosion burned the belly, forearms, and legs of a University of Michigan student. Two other bombs — one left at the University of Utah, another mailed to a Boeing aviation plant in Auburn, Washington — failed to go off. Agents seized those unexploded bombs and blew them up at a safe distance. So far, no one had been killed.
The FBI found more clues in each of those new bombings. Whoever built the explosives had used old scraps of wood, wire, and metal. One FBI bomb expert nicknamed their culprit the "Junkyard Bomber." They also found a mailing label typed out with an old Smith Corona typewriter. But the FBI's scariest discovery came when agents looked at the explosive charges loaded into the latest bombs. Their bomber now used two chemicals — ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder — to create much more powerful blasts.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Unabomber"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Bryan Denson.
Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press.
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