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The bomb-squad cops had always said they were looking for a "junkyard bomber," because his inventions were patched together from lamp cords, bits of pipe, recycled screws and match heads. The first bomb went off at Northwestern University in 1978, bearing the name of a professor at the Technological Institute. A year later, a second bomb was left at the institute, injuring a graduate student who opened it. After that they came to an airline executive, the computer-science departments at Vanderbilt and Berkeley, a University of Michigan professor. He got better at it as he went along, a self-taught killer. The FBI shined him up with an '80s nickname--Unabom, for his favorite targets, universities and airlines. And as it became clear that all the attacks looked to be the work of one man, the Unabom task force was born.
They worked elbow to elbow inside the aging San Francisco federal building, agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and U.S. postal inspectors. They crunched and recrunched scraps of data through a massive parallel-processing computer borrowed from the Pentagon, sifting through school lists, driver's-license registries, lists of people who had checked certain books out of libraries in California and the Middle West. "It was just an incredibly complicated jigsaw puzzle," says a former FBI agent who worked on the case.
Over mugs of coffee in the morning, pizza and beer at midnight, the task force obsessed about his contradictions. He scraped the labels off batteries so they could not be traced, used stamps long past their issue dates and wires that were out of production. He made his own explosives out of commonly available chemicals. He left no fingerprints. Yet he also used distinctive handmade components when store-bought parts would have worked better and been harder to trace. He made switches that he could have bought at Radio Shack. There were always clues and inside jokes, his trademark usually having something to do with wood. When he targeted the president of United Airlines, it was not lost on students of his obsessions that the man's name was Percy Wood, and the bomb came disguised in a book called Ice Brothers, published by Arbor House, whose symbol is a leaf. He polished and sometimes varnished his wood pieces, but it was clear, from the skewed corners and amateurish joints, that he was not a trained woodworker. "He's not a craftsman," Don Davis, a top postal inspector in San Francisco, said months ago. "His cuts aren't straight. They don't make right angles. He spends a lot of time; he does a lot of polishing and sanding to make it feel nice; but they don't look really craftsmanlike."
The agents imagined a smart, twisted man, carving and fiddling into the night. To kill three strangers and injure 22 others, he had to be powerfully angry. Yet he must have enormous patience to experiment with explosives and triggers and not blow his fingers off. "When you see this stuff, some of these components bear markings of having been put together and taken apart repeatedly," said Chris Ronay, the FBI's top bomb expert in the 1980s. "It's not just that he's creating something carefully. He's played with it for a while. He marks things with numbers so he can put them together again right. He's leaving a little of himself at each crime scene."