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Did Ted? David revered his brother's commitment to a full-time wilderness existence. Because his cabin has no running water, David sometimes showered at a bunkhouse maintained by Terlingua Ranch. It was there that in 1983 he met Juan Sanchez, a Mexican farmhand who sometimes did maintenance work at the estates. David helped him secure a green card and urged him to write to his brother in Montana, who he suggested might be able to offer him advice on his immigration problems. That led to a seven-year correspondence. From November 1988 to November 1995, Ted wrote to Sanchez as often as eight times a year in neatly penned, grammatical Spanish. Ted wrote mostly of his poverty and isolation. With a mathematician's precision he described his finances down to the penny. "As to my poverty, I have $53.01 exactly, barely enough to stave off hunger this winter without eating rabbits." At Christmastime 1994, Ted sent Sanchez an intricately carved wooden tube marked with a Latin motto, Montana Semper Liberi (Mountain Men Are Always Free).
By then, David and his wife Linda had been married four years. Their backyard wedding had been a mixture of Buddhist and Christian ceremony. After the bride and groom, sitting before a large painting of a Bodhisattva, clanged finger cymbals and chanted, a Christian minister offered a blessing. It was in late 1994 that Ted wrote asking for money. David sent $1,000 in October. Two months later, Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive, was killed by a device the Unabomber had mailed from San Francisco. In February 1995, David sent Ted $2,000 more. Two months after that, Gilbert Murray, a timber-industry lobbyist, was killed by a mail bomb at his office in Sacramento, California. Ted never paid back the loans.
David began to suspect something in the summer of 1995, when news accounts about the Unabomber reported he was thought to have grown up in Chicago and to have lived in or around Berkeley and Salt Lake City, Utah, all places where Ted had spent time. When the manifesto was published a few months later, David thought he could hear his brother in its philosophy and language. It wasn't just the rote denunciations of technology, a sentiment familiar to anyone who ever cursed a computer. Ted and the Unabomber shared certain turns of phrase. For example, "Eat your cake and have it too." Most people say it the other way around.
Last October David brought his suspicions to Susan Swanson, a childhood friend of his wife's who works for the Investigative Group Inc., a prominent detective firm. She in turn contacted Clinton Van Zandt, a behavioral-science specialist, formerly the FBI's chief hostage negotiator, who runs a security consulting firm. Without saying who had written them, Swanson turned over typed copies of two of Ted's handwritten letters. She asked Van Zandt to compare them with the manifesto. After studying them with a psychiatrist and a linguist, he found a 60% probability the same man had written both. Van Zandt also passed the material on to two specialists in communication. They put the likelihood at 80% to 90%. The first week of January Swanson brought in Anthony Bisceglie, a Washington attorney, who contacted the FBI. In February, he persuaded David to talk to the agents directly. For the family, Bisceglie said, "there was a tremendous amount of anguish."