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But in the end it was not his bombs, not his trademarks, not any sloppy mistake that gave him away. It may have been the Thackeray, the need to work serially and keep his audience in suspense. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber seemed to need to make it clear that those guys were amateurs and he was the pro. Somehow he needed to bring himself back onstage, to get credit for his masterpieces, and for his ability to elude a manhunt for so long. Seventeen years, and he hadn't been caught. Within five days, another deadly package was in the mail, this time to the president of the California Forestry Association--and the bomber immediately made it clear he was getting mad.
The Unabomber began the epistolary striptease that in the end brought him down. Using, as was his custom, the madman's we, he wrote to the New York Times, taunting his hunters. "It doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us anytime soon," the letter said. He wrote to an earlier victim, Yale professor David Gelernter, saying, "If you had any brains, you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world, and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source." Soon he was writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, threatening to blow up an airplane out of Los Angeles, which caused security to be tightened for several days. He promised to stop if the Times and the Washington Post would publish his magnum opus, a 35,000-word screed against industrial society and modern civilization. He said he was growing tired of making bombs. "Certainly his ending his level of seclusion to the point of submitting the manifesto and writing letters," says Ken Thompson, a domestic-terrorism specialist who retired from the FBI last year, "indicated someone at a point in his life where he wanted to gain the popularity of what he had done."
When Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh consulted the publishers of the Post and the Times, they wrestled together over whether they should appear to give in to a terrorist in the hope of stopping the bombings--or worse, provoke him to greater violence by acceding to the demands. But the investigators wanted to take the gamble that some professor, some family member, someone who knew the killer would hear echoes of a friend or student or relative. They were hoping, in short, for David.
David Kaczynski was living in Schenectady, New York, working at a shelter for runaway children. Eight years younger than Ted, he had purchased the Montana land with his brother years before, and occasionally retreated to his own isolated cabin in East Texas that he bought more than 10 years ago. About five years ago, he moved to Schenectady to marry a high school sweetheart, Linda Patrik, an associate professor of philosophy at Union College. It is not clear how much contact he had in recent years with his hermit brother. If David was in touch with Ted, did he ever notice that bombs started going off when his brother went traveling?