Solving Kaczynski

Three years ago, Milton Jones was watching a "Nightline" report on the still-unsolved Unabomber case when he suddenly realized there was a hidden message in the attacks. At the time, investigators were trying to figure out the meaning of the wooden components found in the bombs, and the references to wood and other elements of nature in the choice of victims. Jones, then a graduate student in American Literature at Brigham Young University, theorized that the Unabomber was using a literary technique called juxtaposition. By mailing an explosive device to a person named Wood, or someone living on Aspen Drive, the Unabomber was saying that technology destroyed nature. But by making the bomb partly out of wood, and choosing victims who represented the advance of technology, he was sending a double, underlying message: technology was destroying both itself and nature.

When he told the FBI about his theory, they were intrigued, and asked for more. So he began deconstructing the Unabomber's taunting letters to authorities. That's how, a year before former Berkeley math professor Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in the Montana woods, Jones predicted that the Unabomber would have read author Joseph Conrad, would see himself as in "a war to save the world," and would be "an intellectual, a "conservationist," a loner, and possibly a college teacher.

Although many of Jones' predictions were uncannily accurate, he could not give the FBI what they wanted most: a name. So when Kaczynski's brother David came forward a few months later and did just that, the FBI got their man--and Jones got a polite letter from the agency thanking him for his help (but no reward). As Kaczynski comes before a federal judge today to be sentenced to life in prison, Jones, now an English teacher at Utah Valley State College, plans to watch the news along with the rest of the public. But he has written Kaczynski a letter to ask him one question that still bothers him: Was his theory right?