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WITH A SUSPECT IN CUStody, the team of man hunters could fan out across the country, to universities, hotels, bus depots, trying to retrace his steps, reconstruct the past 18 years of his life and nail down the case against the man they believe is America's most wanted killer. They could also savor the vindication that he fit their expectations so uncannily. He was, as they had surmised, a white male, middle-aged, a loner whom no one would miss if he vanished for weeks at a time. An ideal neighbor who kept to himself--just as the entire town of Lincoln described "the hermit on the hill." The agents had expected a neat, meticulous man, someone who probably kept careful notes and lists. And they found, amid his books, 10 three-ring notebooks full of data and diagrams and test results, the careful professor's lab report on the quest for the perfect bomb.
He had built his home of plywood, with an outhouse out back and a root cellar below and two walls filled floor to ceiling with Shakespeare and Thackeray and bomb manuals. Sometimes he would stay inside for weeks at a stretch. You could smell him coming, steeped in woodsmoke, dressed in black or sometimes fatigues, riding a one-speed bike cooked up out of spare parts. He wouldn't make small talk, often wouldn't even finish a sentence. The dogs figured him out long before the feds did. "All the dogs hated him," recalled Rick Christian, 48, a longtime local. "They'd chase him, bark at him, growl at him when he walked or rode his bike. I had to call them off him before."
Sometimes, when the weather was just too rough, Kaczynski would hitch a ride into town with the mailman. He would come into Lincoln to use the phone, or read endlessly at the library--Montana newspapers (the librarian did not subscribe to out-of-state papers), books in Spanish and German (usually borrowed from other libraries), issues of Scientific American and Omni. Once a month or so, he would visit the grocery store and load staples into his backpack: Spam and canned tuna and flour. He was strange, the townspeople said, but no stranger than others who had come to hide at the end of the world.
Kaczynski, who worked briefly at a neighbor's small sawmill a decade ago, wasn't especially handy, which may be an indication of how easy it is to assemble a mail bomb. "Ted was a hard worker," says his closest neighbor, Leland Mason, 57, "but he was not a smart worker. Short on common sense. He was not mechanically inclined. He had one old pickup truck one summer and drove it until it quit on him. It was just a minor thing that was wrong with the truck, but he didn't know how to fix it. He just let it sit up there, until somebody bought it from him. It only cost the new owner $25 for the part. Ted had a hard time with everyday mechanical things." He tried a chain saw for woodcutting for a while, but that experiment with technology too ended in frustration.