UNABOMBER: TRACKING DOWN THE UNABOMBER

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Whatever doubts David had, whatever unholy fears, became impossible to ignore late last year when he went home to Chicago to help his mother Wanda move out of the small, gray house she had lived in for nearly 30 years. In sorting through their old boxes and trunks, David came upon some of Ted's journals and letters he had written to newspapers years earlier that suddenly sounded darkly familiar. Through a friend, a lawyer in Washington, David made tentative contact with the FBI, and an agent eventually persuaded him to come forward. When FBI agents searched a small shed behind the house, they found bombmaking materials. David pointed them to the Montana cabin, and they began the stakeout, which ended sooner than expected when news of the suspect leaked to a CBS reporter. Word of David's cooperation also leaked, despite assurances of anonymity from the FBI, and at week's end he and his mother Wanda were besieged by minicams at their Schenectady home, to the horror of their FBI handlers.

Ted Kaczynski, meanwhile, broke one or two sly smiles during his arraignment in Helena, Montana, but was otherwise docile and impassive. He had taken the cliche about serial killers--he was a quiet boy, never got in any trouble--and raised it to an art form. He had cast no shadow, left no prints, made few friends, right up until the moment he vanished into the woods.

Born in Chicago in 1942, son of a Polish sausagemaker, Kaczynski was standout smart from childhood. His 89-year-old aunt told the Daily Southtown newspaper in Chicago that his parents were so intent on their son's academic success that they turned him into a "snob." Wanda would take her Theodore to Chicago art museums when he was a baby hoping to stimulate his intellect. "I used to tell her," the aunt said, "'Wanda, the boy is too young. He isn't learning anything.' Later she would tell me [when he was doing well in school], 'You see? He was listening.'"

He sprinted through high school in suburban Evergreen Park, not bothering with his junior year, and made only passing gestures at social contact. He did join the band for two years (he played the trombone) and the Coin Club, Biology Club, German Club and the Math Club, but he never stayed long and did not strike his classmates as weird or worrisome--unlike another student who wound up in jail. He did have one notable hobby, though: "I remember Ted had the know-how of putting together things like batteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever and creating explosions," recalls his boyhood friend Dale Eickelman, now a Dartmouth professor. The boys detonated explosives in fields or in a metal garbage can, using ingredients they could scrounge around the house or buy at the hardware store.