Copyright 1997 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San Francisco Chronicle
NOVEMBER 9, 1997, SUNDAY, SUNDAY EDITION
SECTION: ;Pg. 1/Z1
LENGTH: 5090 words
HEADLINE: A Trail of Bombs When Theodore J. Kaczynski goes on trial this week, the government will try
BYLINE: Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
DATELINE: Sacramento
BODY:
He was the ultimate Luddite, a professed hater of technology. And yet, the government says, he was also the wizard of technology, a superb craftsman who used his vast knowledge of physics and math to master the intricate art of bomb-making.
He outwitted and frustrated a federal posse for nearly 18 years, content to lob bombs from the cellar of anonymity. But then his ego overrode his sense of caution, as he forced his abstruse writings on the world, and he was arrested in a matter of months -- turned in by his own brother, who had recognized the odd turn of phrase.
For a quarter of a century, the hermit lived in a rustic cabin in rural Montana, a packrat who saved everything that came to hand -- scraps of paper, bits of wire, newspaper articles, journals, notebooks, copies of letters, all of which may soon prove to be the engine of his undoing.
When the trial of Theodore J. Kaczynski begins in the federal court of Judge Garland Burrell Jr. Wednesday , assuming there are no last-minute postponements, prosecutors Robert Cleary, R. Steven Lapham and Stephen Freccero will be using Kaczynski's hoard to try and hang the former professor by his own words -- the thousands of pages of journals found in Kaczynski's home that detailed every single bombing and examined them over and over, like a jeweler cutting and polishing a diamond, facet by facet. Word by word.
''Experiment 97. Dec. 11, 1985, I planted bomb disguised to look like scrap of lumber behind Rentech Compute (SIC) Store in Sacramento. According to San Francisio (sic) Examiner, Dec.20, The 'operator' (owner? manager?) of the store was killed, 'blown to bits.' ''
Kaczynski, the bearded, slight, soft-spoken and brilliant mathematician who chats animatedly with his lawyers, Quin Denvir, Judy Clarke and Gary Sowards. Kaczynski, the mentally diseased loner, those lawyers say, who should not be put to death.
Then there's the Kaczynski who, federal prosecutors believe, coldly and methodically perfected his methods of murder, honing his skills and keeping up his ''lab notes,'' much like the graduate student he once was, detailing each of the 16 bombing incidents of which he is suspected and chortling in writing about how he was thwarting the UNABOM Task Force.
Kaczynski, according to the federal government, is the Unabomber -- the mysterious killer who planted or mailed bombs all over the country between 1978 and 1995 in a campaign of terror that took the lives of three people and injured 23 others. UNABOM is a government acronym that comes from a contraction of ''university'' and ''airline,'' the first of his targets.
Kaczynski, who is 55, was arrested April 3, 1996, at his cabin near Lincoln, Mont. He is charged in Sacramento with planting or mailing bombs that killed computer store owner Hugh Scrutton in 1985 and timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray 10 years later. He is also charged with sending bombs in 1993 that injured Yale computer scientist David Gelernter and University of California at San Francisco geneticist Charles Epstein. And in a separate indictment in New Jersey, he has been charged with the mail-bomb of advertising executive Thomas Mosser.
If convicted in the California case, Kaczynski could receive the death penalty, and the government is doing its best to see that that happens.
The case seems more complex because there were so many bombings and, perforce, a myriad of evidence, but in the end, it is still a straightforward criminal prosecution. The federal lawyers will put forensic experts on the witness stand and will also put federal agents on the witness stand.
But the real meat of the case will come when they show the jurors the mountain of material found in Kaczynski's cabin. A compulsive collector, he kept copies of nearly every letter he wrote, he kept copies of his 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto, he kept the typewriter that wrote all those letters and the manifesto, and he kept all the tools and all the little bits and pieces that went into making bombs. He even kept a fully functional bomb that the government says is nearly identical to many of the bombs used by the Unabomber. Sort of a working model. For reference.
''In the late 1970s,'' federal prosecutors wrote in one of their pretrial briefs, Kaczynski ''recorded the details of his first bombing, and he continued memorializing his bombing activities through the final entries. (His) journals contain extensive discussions of Kaczynski's . . . ideology and motivations, and expressions of his intent to kill his victims. Briefly stated, Kaczynski despised anyone who interfered with the solitude that he craved, and he harbored a deep-seated hatred of certain aspects of modern technological and industrial society.''
The defense lawyers have pleaded their client not guilty and have been pretty circumspect about what they will say in Kaczynski's defense -- there has not been much talk about the possibility that the feds got the wrong man. The defense has not made a big case for the idea that any of the more than 2,000 other suspects investigated by the UNABOM task force should be on trial, rather than their client. Over last summer and early fall, Kaczynski's lawyers began filing court documents that say they will probably bring in a psychiatrist or two to testify about paranoid schizophrenia and how this may relate to Kaczynski, and, more realistically, how this possible ''mental disease or defect,'' as the lawyers call it, may have an impact on the jury that could vote to execute the client.
In a larger sense, though, the public is watching this case intently, because it was the longest-running serial bombing in U.S. history, and when the alleged bomber was finally caught, he did not fit all those notions we have about our criminals.
''Here's what makes this case interesting,'' said Nanci Clarence, a former federal public defender now in private practice in San Francisco. ''The FBI has been leaking all this forensic evidence for years, but what do we know about Ted Kaczynski, about what makes him tick? Not very much. It's a fascinating story, because he doesn't fit the prototype of a crazed criminal. He's a Harvard- educated genius, an American success story kind of run amok. How did he get from there to here?''
He grew up in a bookish left-wing Chicago family, was a member of the Science Club in high school, and after Harvard went to the University of Michigan for his Ph.D. He taught math at the University of California at Berkeley from 1967 to 1969 and, as one observer of the case said the other day, ''if he hadn't turned into a bombing lunatic hermit, he'd still be in Berkeley, reading the New York Times at Cafe Roma on Bancroft and driving a battered old Volvo.''
Instead, after his stint as a math professor ended, Kaczynski disappeared. With his brother, David, he bought a piece of land outside the small town of Lincoln, Mont., built himself a 10-foot-by-12-foot cabin, sans electricity or running water, and burrowed in. Alone.
The bombings began on May 25, 1978, when a woman found a package in a parking lot at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus. The package was addressed to a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, N.Y., and had a return address of a professor at Northwestern University. Suspicions aroused, the woman called the Northwestern professor, who called police. When an officer opened the package, it exploded, injuring him slightly.
Three more Chicago bombs followed -- two in 1979 and one in 1980. One of the 1979 bombs exploded in the hold of an airliner heading from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The bomber had figured out how to modify a barometer to act as a switch, setting off the device when the airplane reached a certain altitude.
The pattern of bombs, however, was not something anyone could pin down. Over the years, bombs were placed near or mailed to targets in Utah, Tennessee, Washington, Michigan, Connecticut, New Jersey and California.
Most of the bombs exploded, but like any experimenter who is honing his craft, he had his problems.
A bomb placed at the University of Utah in October 1981 was found by police.
''I attempted a bombing and spent nearly three hundred bucks just for travel expenses, motel, clothing for disguise, etc.,'' Kaczynski wrote in his journal. ''Aside from cost of materials for the bomb. and then the thing failed to explode. Damn.''
And in a rare critique of the Unabomber's manufacturing prowess, a government agent wrote, ''despite meticulous handicraft, all but one of the bombs were characterized by excess solder.'' Excess or not, the bombs kept coming, and from then on, with one exception, they all worked.
But there was still no discernible logic to the bombing campaign. No communiques from the bomber, no evidence of a grudge against a particular university or airline. Between June 1980 and July 1982, there were only four bombs. In 1985 alone, however, there were four -- one of them, in Sacramento, brought the Unabomber his first fatality. In 1987, when the Unabomber placed a device in a Salt Lake City parking lot, a woman caught a glimpse of him as he stood up. This resulted in the infamous sketch showing a sweatshirt-hooded man wearing dark glasses. Driven underground by an apparent excess of caution, he did not bomb again for six years -- until June 1993.
That is also when he decided to go public, a move that would ultimately bring him down.
At about the same time he sent bombs to Epstein and Gelernter, he wrote to the New York Times saying he was the designated representative of an anarchist group called ''FC.'' (FC stood for ''Freedom Club,'' according to a copy of a 1985 letter found in Kaczynski's cabin. FC was found stamped on the end plates of some of the bombs.)
The killing resumed in December 1994, when Mosser, the advertising executive, was decapitated after opening a package he had received in the mail at his New Jersey home. In April 1995, one day after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Unabomber's last victim, Gilbert Murray, died when he opened a mail bomb at the Sacramento headquarters of the California Forestry association.
In 1995, the Unabomber became a creature of the spotlight: He wrote the New York Times, offering to ''desist from terrorism'' if the Times published his 35,000-word manifesto. He wrote The Chronicle, threatening to blow up an airplane at Los Angeles International Airport. He sent his manifesto to the Times and other publications, as well as to UC Berkeley professor Tom Tyler, whose public comments comparing the Oklahoma City bombing with the UNABOM case had irked him. Over the summer of 1995, editors of the few newspapers that had obtained leaked copies of the manifesto dithered over whether to publish it, most of them deciding not to.
The FBI agent in charge of the investigation, Jim R. Freeman, quietly urged publication, figuring -- correctly, as it turned out -- that if the manifesto was out there, somebody would pick up on it, would see something in that dense thicket of anti-technology hysteria that would ring a few bells.
''We were trying to smoke the guy out,'' Freeman, who retired from the bureau last year, said the other day. ''The manifesto was the key to everything. Most serial bombers write manifestos, claim credit and get it off their chest. But (the Unabomber) kept his mouth shut for so many years. Once he came forward, it made sense to get the manifesto out.''
Freeman said the FBI and the Department of Justice made a ''very high-level approach'' to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two newspapers in which the Unabomber had demanded publication.
In September 1995, the Post, in a joint venture with the Times, bent to the demands of the Unabomber and the request by the FBI -- it was not a high point in the history of a free press, journalism critics said later -- and published the manifesto. Within months, David Kaczynski, racked with an increasing sense of foreboding, determined that it could easily have been written by his brother.
By February 1996, he and his mother, Wanda, had made the wrenching decision to go to the FBI, through intermediaries, and within weeks, Theodore J. Kaczynski was under surveillance in Montana. When he was arrested on April 3, he was docile and polite, like the professor he had once been.
Once they had Kaczynski, the task force investigators, who had spent more than $ 50 million trying to find the Unabomber, suddenly began to see the 17-year pattern. It all started to fit, given the background of their prime suspect.
The first four bombs ''were placed in or mailed from the Chicago area, where (Kaczynski) was born and lived for many years, including the years 1978 to 1980, when those bombs exploded,'' prosecutors said in one of their briefs.
''Bombs 5 and 12 (placed in Salt Lake City), bomb 6 (mailed from Provo, Utah), and bomb 10 (mailed from Salt Lake City) were connected to an area where (Kaczynski) had worked from late 1972 to early 1973. Bomb 10 was mailed to a professor at the University of Michigan, where Kaczynski obtained his Ph.D. Bombs 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15 and 16 were mailed from or placed in Northern California, where the defendant taught as a college professor. Indeed, bombs 7 and 8 were placed at the same university at which Kaczynski taught, the University of California at Berkeley. Bomb 17 was found inside Kaczynski's cabin.''
They also found in the lab notes, that, like a chemistry professor doing endless research, Kaczynski was obsessed with finding what worked best.
He ''frequently tinkered with the number and types of batteries that he used in his bombs,'' the prosecutors wrote, so when he said in a lab note that he used six D-cells in bomb 8, eight in bomb 9, four D's and six triple A's in bomb 10, and so forth, ''in each instance, the physical proof recovered at the crime scene corroborates Kaczynski's account of the batteries he used.''
It seems like damning evidence, and many veteran defense attorneys conceded that it doesn't look good for Kaczynski, which is one of the reasons, experts say, that the defense is raising the issue of Kaczynski's mental health.
''This is tactically a more attractive defense,'' Stephen Meagher, a former federal prosecutor said. ''It shifts the burden to the prosecution because (the defense attorneys) are arguing that the defendant didn't have the capacity to form the requisite intent. You have to have specific intent to kill or injure. You have to prove that he had the intent not only to do the acts, but also to have those results.''
But there is also an overarching strategy, many experts say, that goes not so much to whether Kaczynski did it, but to whether he should ultimately be put to death.
In one of the case's many ironies, his family turned him in with the hope that Attorney General Janet Reno, grateful to have the suspect practically delivered to her, would not seek the death penalty. It didn't turn out that way, so the family's only hope of keeping Kaczynski alive, should he be convicted, lies in how the defense gets across to the jury that their client is psychologically unbalanced.
''What's really going on here,'' Meagher said, ''is about the death penalty. It's not about guilt or innocence. The point is that even if he's legally guilty, he is so screwed up that he is not somebody we should put to death.''
If anyone should know how to get that across, it should be Judy Clarke, the veteran public defender who is one of Kaczynski's lawyers. Two years ago, she defended Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drove her two toddlers into a lake and left them in her car to drown.
Early on in the Smith trial, Clarke and her co-counsel David Bruck, ''were able to interject some issues'' about Smith's mental health, according to South Carolina prosecutor Tommy Pope, who tried the case. The jury apparently listened well when Clarke and Bruck argued that the young mother was not malicious, but was suicidal and mentally unstable. The jury decided she was not someone they wanted to see executed and gave her life in prison instead.
With Kaczynski, defense lawyers say, assuming the ex-professor is convicted, it will all come down to the penalty phase of the trial, when the jury in Sacramento decides what punishment the bomber should get.
It is likely that the defense lawyers will ask Kaczynski's mother to testify, to offer some insight into how her son made that journey, as attorney Nanci Clarence put it, ''from there to here.''
Wanda Kaczynski may very well repeat what she told the Washington Post in an interview two months after her son was arrested.
She said that when Ted was 9 months old, his body suddenly became covered with hives. She took him to the hospital, where he spent a week being examined by doctors for what appeared to be a severe allergic reaction.
She remembers him being absolutely terrified by the experience, according to the Post account, and she wonders, half a century later, whether this contributed to her son's slowly evolving anger.
''I ponder endlessly over it,'' she said in that interview. ''What could I have done to keep him out of the wilderness? What could I have done to give him a happier life? And yet there were so many happy, wonderful times with the family. I just don't know. I just don't know.''
Who does?
'MR. STRANGER-DANGER'
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When you think of big, high-profile serial killers, the Unabomber, in the eyes of many experts was unusual -- for two decades, he stayed resolutely anonymous, refusing to meld into the showy criminal mainstream of random killers who taunt the public with letters, such as San Francisco's Zodiac killer.
But once the Unabomber went public with his voluminous writings -- in the summer and fall of 1995 -- it took less than a year to catch the brilliant ex-mathematician, Theodore J. Kaczynski, hoisted on the petard of his own prose. And now Kaczynski has reached what even he might think is that mundane level of notoriety, With websites, books and hundreds of articles devoted to him. He is squarely in the American pantheon of notorious crime figures.
''We've seen this in all kinds of B-movies,'' Scott Turow, best-selling crime novelist and former federal prosecutor, said in an interview. ''Ted Kaczynski is 'Mr. Stranger- Danger' in person. He's the bogeyman. He's Rex Luthor. He's an evil genius, and he went to Harvard. The notion of some hermit committing ruthless and random bombings is really not a new story.''
As serial bombers go, the Unabomber had the longest run of any of them, but in the 1950s, the country was transfixed by a mad bomber who had planted 32 bombs in the New York area between 1940 and 1957. George Metesky, a disgruntled former employee of Consolidated Edison Co., was caught after he began communicating with a New York newspaper.
After he confessed, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane. He was released in 1973 and died in a Waterbury convalescent home in May 1994 at the age of 90.
Metesky's main beef was with a utility. The Unabomber went much further -- targeting, in his letters and tracts, the vast culture of technology, with all its social ramifications.
''In a way, he's kind of a '60s fallout, a product of Berkeley at that time and place,'' said San Francisco novelist Richard North Patterson, who also a lawyer. Patterson said that 20 and 30 years ago, radicalism had its pockets of popularity.
''But now in the '90s, people are worried,'' Patterson said, and the Unabomber is seen more as ''the seedy neighbor on the block, the man you don't want your kids to play with. His political agenda is so beyond the pale that I think more people are inclined to view him for what he is -- a mentally disturbed person whose politics are an expression of his maladjustment and are not to be taken seriously. He's being viewed as a killer, not as a political figure.''
One man who views the Unabomber with a certain familiarity most of us don't have is David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist who opened what he thought was an envelope containing a graduate student's thesis on June 24, 1993, only to have his right hand and other parts of his body mangled by a powerful bomb.
Gelernter survived -- barely -- and he wrote a book about his experiences, calling it, ''Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.''
Like Patterson, Gelernter points to that 1960s and '70s part of U.S. history when radicalism was chic -- or at least more chic than it is now -- and says, ''relatively few people do it anymore, but there is still an approach to life that makes heroes of murderers -- whether it's Palestinian terrorists or the Viet Cong or the Khmer Rouge. That attitude has left a profound cultural residue.''
And what if he had a chance to talk to Kaczynski?
''Never in a million years would I sink to the level of talking to him,'' he says. ''I think he should be executed.''
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THE UNABOMBER EVIDENCE
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What government prosecutors plan to use at trial:
1. The typewriter ''used to type all identifiable Unabomber correspondence since 1982. This typewriter ties Kaczynski to mailing labels and correspondence'' found on or near seven of the bombs and to letters written to The Chronicle and the New York Times.
2. A carbon copy of the 35,000- word anti-technology manifesto -- the original went to the New York Times -- and a handwritten draft of the manifesto.
3. Handwritten or carbon copies of letters sent by the Unabomber, including ''those that accompanied bombs, letters to the New York Times, and cover letters'' to other publications and individuals.
4. A handwritten autobiography, written in 1979, ''which contains the statement that Kaczynski intends to start killing people and that the purpose of the autobiography is to explain that he is not sick.''
5. Notebooks, mostly in Spanish or code and journals in English ''which together contain admissions or inculpatory statements to each of the 16 bombing incidents.'' Kaczynski's lawyers have already conceded that the journals, notebooks, autobiography and nearly every other document in the cabin were created by Kaczynski.
6. Three-ring binders ''which memorialize Kaczynski's experiments over the years with various types of bombs and explosive chemical compounds. These experiments show a clear progression in Kaczynski's bomb-making capabilities, describe the construction of several of the UNABOM devices and how each was deployed.''
7. A piece of paper with the 10-digit code (553-25-4394) that the Unabomber used to identify himself to his correspondents, such as the New York Times.
8. Green paneling nails forensically matched to the same kind of nails ''used as shrapnel in the (Gilbert) Murray and (Thomas) Mosser bombs.''
9. A ''fully functional'' bomb ''similar in design and construction to the Murray bomb and components of which can be forensically associated with components of the (Charles) Epstein and (David) Gelernter bombs.''
10. ''Various bomb components including triggers, initiators, pipes and chemicals.''
11. Bomb-making chemicals, bits and pieces of wire and ''a unique pivot switch virtually identical'' to the switches found in the Epstein, Mosser and Gelernter bombs; and tools ''such as hand drills, drill bits, files, screwdrivers, planing equipment, wire cutters/pliers, and a vise.''
12. ''Testimony of witnesses who can trace some of Kaczynski's movements, as well as various business records showing Kaczynski's travels and financial resources.''
* ---------------------------------------------------------------
UNABOMB TIMELINE
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* May 22, 1942: Theodore J. Kaczynski born in Evergreen, Ill.
* 1950: Brother David born.
* 1958: Kaczynski graduates from Evergreen Park Community High School.
* 1962: Graduates from Harvard with degree in mathematics.
* 1964: Receives master's degree in math from University of Michigan.
* 1967: Obtains Ph.D. from University of Michigan.
* 1967-69: Assistant math professor at University of California at Berkeley.
* Jan. 20, 1969: Turns in resignation letter to UC administration.
* June 30, 1969: Kaczynski resigns from UC faculty. Father tells friend his son quit math because he did not want to teach engineers how to make nuclear weapons.
* 1970: David Kaczynski receives bachelor's degree from Columbia University.
* 1971: Kaczynski brothers purchase 1.4 acres on Stemple Pass near Lincoln, Mont. Ted builds his 10-foot-by-12-foot cabin.
* 1978: Ted and David both living with their parents in Lombard, Ill. Kaczynski gets his first Illinois driver's license.
* May 25, 1978: Package bomb injures Terry Marker, a Northwestern University security guard.
* May 9, 1979: A disguised bomb explodes at Northwestern University, injuring graduate student John Harris.
* Nov. 15, 1979: A parcel aboard a commercial flight from Chicago explodes, forcing an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Twelve people are injured from smoke inhalation.
* June 10, 1980: United Airlines president Percy Wood is injured when he opens a package bomb at his home in Lake Forest, Ill.
* Oct. 8, 1981: An explosive device at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City is defused.
* April 23, 1982: Package mailed to Penn State forwarded to Vanderbilt University.
* May 5, 1982: Janet Smith, a secretary at Vanderbilt University, suffers minor injuries opening a package mailed from Provo, Utah, that explodes.
* May 1982: Document shows that David Kaczynski is removed from co-ownership of Montana property.
* July 2, 1982: UC Berkeley professor Diogenes Angelakos is injured by a bomb on campus.
* April 29, 1985: Ted Kaczynski stays at Park Hotel in Helena, Mont.
* May 15, 1985: A booby-trapped book detonates at UC Berkeley. Graduate student John Hauser is severely injured, losing partial vision in his left eye and four fingers on his right hand.
* June 13, 1985: Parcel mailed from Oakland to Boeing Co. in Washington state is found to be a bomb. The explosive is defused.
* Nov. 15, 1985: A package is mailed from Salt Lake City to the home of a University of Michigan professor. Research assistant Nick Suino is injured when the package explodes.
* Dec. 11, 1985: Hugh Scrutton is killed outside his Sacramento computer rental store picking up a piece of nail-riddled wood that, in fact, was a bomb.
* Feb. 20, 1987: A computer store owner in Salt Lake City is injured when he picks up a piece of wood that also turns out to be a bomb.
* Oct. 2, 1990: Kaczynski's father commits suicide at 78; he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
* June 5 and 6, 1993: Kaczynski stays at Park Hotel in Helena.
* June 1993: The Unabomber, saying he is part of a group called ''FC,'' mails letter to the New York Times, warning of an upcoming newsworthy event.
* June 22, 1993: UCSF geneticist Charles Epstein is severely injured opening a package bomb sent to his home in Tiburon and mailed from Sacramento.
* June 24, 1993: Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter is severely injured opening an explosive parcel in his office. The parcel was mailed from Sacramento on June 18, 1993.
* Dec. 10, 1994: Thomas Mosser is killed at his North Caldwell, N.J., home while opening a package mailed to him from the San Francisco area. The package bore the return address of a fictitious professor at San Francisco State University.
* Spring 1995: David Kaczynski is reinstated as co-owner of Montana property.
* March 13, 1995: Ted Kaczynski stays at Park Hotel.
* April 20, 1995: Unabomber sends a letter to the New York Times claiming responsibility for killing Thomas Mosser.
* April 24, 1995: Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, is killed by a package bomb in his Sacramento office.
* June 27, 1995: The San Francisco Chronicle receives Unabomber letter threatening to ''blow up an airliner'' flying out of Los Angeles International Airport.
* June 28, 1995: New York Times receives Unabomber manifesto.
* Sept. 19, 1995: Washington Post publishes Unabomber manifesto.
* Jan. 15, 1996: Mother Wanda Kaczynski puts her Lombard, Ill., home up for sale.
* January 1996: Anthony Bisceglie, lawyer for David Kaczynski, contacts a friend at the FBI, side-stepping the UNABOM task force, after David Kaczynski tells the lawyer he suspects the Unabomber is his brother, Ted.
* Feb. 15, 1996: U.S. News & World Report says Attorney General Janet Reno has received a memo identifying Kaczynski as the prime suspect.
* March 11, 1996: Agents search Wanda Kaczynski's home.
* March 15, 1996: Sale of Kaczynski home is finalized.
* March 19, 1996: FBI agents search shed behind the Lombard house.
* April 3, 1996: FBI agents arrest Kaczynski at his Montana cabin and take him into custody on a single explosive charge and for questioning about the Unabomber.
* June 19, 1996: A federal grand jury in Sacramento, scene of two of the three Unabomber slayings, hands up a 10-count indictment charging Kaczynski in connection with the bombing deaths of Scrutton and Murray, as well as the mail-bomb injuries of Epstein and Gelernter.
* Sept. 20, 1996: The government reveals that Kaczynski kept a journal detailing all 16 bomb incidents attributed to the Unabomber.
* Oct. 1, 1996: A federal grand jury in New Jersey indicts Kaczynski in the mail-bomb death of advertising executive Thomas Mosser.
* March 3, 1997: Kaczynski's lawyers ask U.S. District Court Judge Garland Burrell Jr. to throw out all the evidence gathered by federal agents in their nine-day search of Kaczynski's cabin.
* June 25, 1997: Defense lawyers, in pretrial filings, give the first indication they may use a ''diminished mental capacity'' strategy.
* June 27, 1997. Burrell rules that the prosecution may use all the evidence found in the cabin. Big setback for the defense.
* Sept. 3, 1997: Kaczynski complains about the noise in the Sacramento County Jail and is transferred to the federal prison in Dublin.
* Nov. 12, 1997: Trial is scheduled to start in U.S. District Court, Sacramento.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (25),(1) Jim Freeman, special agent-in-charge of the Unabomber investigation, held a press conference in the Federal Building in San Francisco in September 1995. , CHRIS STEWART, The Chronicle, (2-12) Theodore J. Kaczynski, (13) This police sketch circulated after a woman glimpsed the Unabomber planting a bomb in a Salt Lake City parking lot in February 1987, (14) Northwestern University, (15) Home of Percy Wood, (16) Hugh Scrutton, (17-18) Wanda and David Kaczynski in Glenville, N.Y., in April 1996 , (18) By Associated Press, (19) Kaczynski's secluded, 10-foot-by-12-foot cabin in Lincoln, Mont.