← Back to all episodes
How Was The Unabomber Investigated?
Tom Nunemaker • 2024-04-02
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, how was the Unabomber investigated? You will learn in this episode, key events in the Unabom investigation, how resources were allocated, and the impact this case had on future investigations. Our guest has served in the FBI for 23 years. Ultimately, retiring while selected for the Senior Executive Service and assigned as the Chief of the Violent Crime Section at FBI headquarters. But, in February of 1995, he was transferred to FBI headquarters, where he was the Headquarters Supervisor for the Unabom investigation. I introduce to you Tom Nunemaker. I am sitting in my room, flipping through the pages of a book called The Gift of Fear, written by Gavin Daybecker. I come across a story that recounts a gentleman that receives a package that is rather odd, and he's at his place of work when he receives this. He makes a comment to a coworker that, this looks like a bomb or something. And I think he goes to the restroom, so he walks away from the room, and on his way down the hall, he hears an explosion. And the book talks about how this was an incident from the Unabomber case, which I was completely unfamiliar with, so this just sounded extremely odd to hear of this incident. And so I went ahead and did some research and kind of learned all about this case, and tried to understand the best I could. And then all of a sudden, I came across a gentleman that knew a little bit more about that than I did. So, Tom, can you describe when you first became involved with the Unabomber case, and what were your job responsibilities and duties for that investigation?
Tom Nunemaker:I was stationed in Los Angeles at the time. It was my second duty station. And I was seeking promotion. The next logical step is to go back to headquarters in DC as a supervisor, and I did. And I went into the unit that actually had oversight for the Unabomber investigation. I'd been there a few months. I did a couple of projects for one of the assistant directors. And I don't know, I think he liked the way I did my stuff. And he basically asked me how I would feel about working on the Unabom Task Force full time. They were going to detail me to that. The Unabom Task Force had never had a full-time supervisor dedicated to it exclusively before. I jumped at the chance. And the first thing they had me do was go out and A, introduce myself, and make an assessment of how everything was going and what their needs were. So let me start right here. I'm the headquarters advocate for Unabom, and I'm there. Part of my job is to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, spending the money wisely, etc. And it's my job back at headquarters almost on a daily basis to brief the higher-ups what exactly is going on out there. But I'm also, I was a 10-year street agent, and when I got out there, I was just fascinated at what was going on with this case. So I wanted to be their advocate. I wanted to help them as best I could. Sometimes headquarters supervisors don't always get the warmest reception out in the field. And Terry Turchie, who was the ASAC in charge of the investigation, and I always told him this. I think he did the smartest thing. From day one, he just welcomed me to the team and just made me feel at home. And I was sold. And I think what he got out of that was he got a headquarters supervisor that was going to do everything he could to help further that investigation, get him what he needed. So other than I took monthly trips out there, I wasn't really a part of investigative decisions, what we're going to do, when we're going to do that. They'd run things by me, which was nice. But I was sort of the administrative guy back at headquarters, getting them what they needed. And sometimes that was tough because they were starting to get resources from all over the FBI. And there were other FBI field divisions and personnel and stuff. They didn't like losing all their resources. I was rotating in TDY personnel. I looked at the budgets. I got them money, I got them cars, I got them extra agents, I tried to get them analysts. Basically, mine was mostly an administrative function, but I tried to just get everything I could for them, because I felt that strongly about what they were doing and how they were doing it. The Unabom Task Force at San Francisco was just incredible.
Dylan Carnahan:So with this role that you have, right? You're providing support, you're looking, you're analyzing their needs. It would make sense that you had a good feel for their needs, as well as some of the challenges they faced. So can you describe what were some of those initial challenges that the investigative team faced when you were there? And how had they evolved over the course of this investigation?
Tom Nunemaker:Probably number one was manpower, agents, and especially analysts, computer support, computer equipment, and budget. I mean, no one had a clue how this was going to burn resources the way it had been burning. The original, after its initial bombing, I think 1970, I'm trying to think when the first one was, in 1978, they set up a Unabomb Task Force in San Francisco, and it didn't have many people. It had representatives from ATF, US Postal Service, obviously the FBI. But it wasn't until Terry Turchie was assigned to oversee it, I think in 1994, and Terry is, my hat's off to Terry. He reorganized that task force. He started looking at things he needed. I showed up one of his doorstep in 1995. We worked pretty well together. And I came back to headquarters and I had to justify everything. I had a job to do, but I mean, I briefed the assistant director almost on a daily basis, Violent Crimes Section Chief on a daily basis, had to write a report every day that went to the director every morning. And those were the things that I hope helped Terry get the resources that he really needed. But I got him support, photographic support when they needed it, SWAT support, I mean, things like vehicles. I mean, it's just amazing. They needed a little bit of everything. They were doing a hell of a job with what they had, but by increasing their resources, manpower, equipment, training, set up a lot of training conferences, I think that really helped. Before is all over with, they had about 150, 200 people, dedicated agents and analysts just working in San Francisco. They had three computer squads working 24 hours a day, analyzing that at some point, we'll probably talk about the volume of leads. I've never seen anything like it in any case before, or any case since, and they all had to be flushed out, and that takes manpower.
Dylan Carnahan:I mean, it seems like an extensive lift to not only have this investigation, but to coordinate between all the other agencies and needs to continue this investigation.
Tom Nunemaker:Well, the nice thing was, we had some smart people back at headquarters. A lot of times when a case becomes this big, people at headquarters, I don't want to say want to micromanage, obviously, to do their job diligently, they want to know what's going on. But I will say that they gave Terry and the SAC, the Specialty in Charge in San Francisco, Jim Freeman, they gave him the latitude to basically run this in the field, which is how all investigations are run and should be run, and headquarters provides the oversight. Unfortunately, in real life, sometimes headquarters wants to insert themselves a little bit more than maybe they should. And the guys that work back at headquarters, from the Assistant Director to the, all the way up to the Director, they allowed Terry to do things the way he wanted to. And he had some novel approaches. He had some novel ideas. He had some novel techniques that until then hadn't always been used in a traditional sense in FBI investigations. I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point.
Dylan Carnahan:So the investigation itself, we've got all of our necessary resources where we kind of have this integration and cooperation amongst different areas to provide for it. I know that a pivotal moment in this investigation that spanned so long was the publication of the Unabomber's Manifesto. Can you talk about the decision making that comes into play with a decision like that and how it impacted things from that point forward?
Tom Nunemaker:Can I just give a little background first that it was funny. This case has worked out a violent crimes section because Unabom, universities, airplanes, bomber, that's how that arose. Because the unit I was in had jurisdiction for crimes aboard aircraft. Nowadays, this would be worked out of our counterintelligence division and it would be worked as a domestic terrorism case. But in the old days, it was a crime aboard an aircraft and blowing things up obviously is a violent crime. So the traditional crimes, especially violent crimes, are generally made to the collection of forensic evidence. So, you know, you have eyewitnesses, you have statements, you have evidence, you have all sorts of things that can help you identify and locate and apprehend the perpetrator as well as prosecute them in court. The insidious thing about bombing investigations, they destroy the very evidence that you're looking for. Also, you have an individual, maybe we can get into Ted a little bit, Ted Kaczynski, brilliant guy, went to Harvard at 15, was a professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley. By the time he was 25, his IQ is just off the chart. But he was, you'll hear this term, lone wolf. He was a true lone wolf. He didn't associate with anybody. He didn't talk to anybody. He didn't say anything to anybody. And that's the hardest person to catch. You have a criminal who is highly intelligent. No, and he lived in the woods by himself for 25 years. That doesn't make things any easier. But he's a lone wolf, doesn't associate with anybody. The crime he commits virtually leaves no forensic evidence behind. And then he walked the walk. He talked the talk. And he said, I don't believe in technology. He moved into a 10 by 14 cabin in the woods of Montana and lived there for 25 years. No electricity, no running water, no nothing. I mean, that's, you could say a dedicated person or maybe somebody as crazy as a loon. I don't know. But he was a bright guy. But that was one of the hardest things. Now, what Terry did, he took over in 1994 and he sort of revamped the whole task force. I came in 1995. His first priority was to go back and revisit everything. And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of documents and things to revisit. There was not when he took over, but in total, there were 16 different bombings. I think when he took over, there were about 12 or 13. And he set up a whole squad just to revisit each thing. And he had a philosophy. He wanted to separate fact from fiction from mythology. Because when you have a long-term investigation like this, obviously not everything is factual. The problem is some things when they go on so long, they create their own little myths. So his concept, I want to bore down, I want to drill down, and I want to get to the facts, and I want to deal with the facts. So with that said, forensic evidence didn't really make this case. Terry was a big believer in integrating behavioral analysis with the collection of forensic evidence. So they started a whole nother section with people like Kathy Buckett and Jim Fitzgerald, really looking, trying to determine based on the events that he did, trying to get some kind of behavioral profile. And there are many profiles out there. Many of them were wrong. Many of them were way off. Some of them were sort of close. We didn't know it. The thing is, forensic evidence didn't make this case, but it's good, Terry, what he did all these years, because when he's, and well, it didn't lead us to Ted, but when he was apprehended and ultimately arrested, it was all that stuff that put the nails in his coffin when he went to trial. And that's so all those years of collecting all this information didn't lead us to Ted, but it certainly made everything a lot easier when we got to the trial phase. So now to answer your question. Yeah, 1995, he sends a manifesto. He'd actually start writing the different people papers and stuff. I think about 1993, but he sent the manifesto in 1995 to the New York Times and he basically said, if you will publish this manifesto, I think it was 35,000 word document, I will stop killing people. I will stop bombing. And in newspapers and law enforcement, they don't like to negotiate with criminals. They don't want to negotiate with terrorists. They don't want to set a precedent of doing so. You can only imagine at the highest levels, the director, Janet Reno, the attorney general, the owners and managers of the Washington Post and New York Times met several, several times to discuss the merits, the pros and cons of publishing this manifesto. And I quite honestly, I don't think anybody believed, a few did, but I don't think anybody really believed that if we published it, would he actually stop bombing. So, you're trying to look at that. Are we going to publish and then the guy does a bomb anyhow, even though he said he wouldn't? But some people are saying if we publish, we might save lives. But now, here's the key. Based on all the work that Terry and the Unabom Task Force had done, based on all the behavioral analysis that they had at that point, they said, this guy is a true believer and he's probably felt this way his entire life. So, as a student, as a child, as a teacher, somewhere, he's espoused these feelings before. That came from the behavioral analysis. This wasn't a guy making this stuff up, you know, like a smoke screen. This guy felt like this the way he did about technology and everything else, probably his entire life. So, there is a belief that someone out there, that they published this, is gonna recognize the writing, the style of writing or the actual writing itself. That leads us up. It was published. I think within a few weeks, we had 50,000 new leads that you gotta run down and cover. Everybody in the world said, I know who it is. He was at McDonald's yesterday. It's my brother-in-law. It's my ex-husband. I mean, it's crazy. When you use the media, it's a two-edged sword. It can gain you a lot of information but it can create a lot of work that you just have to do it. I remember after the bombing at the Cams, the computer store in Salt Lake City, that was the only time he's ever seen. They came up with a composite and the composite was put out in the media. After that, if you have a timeline, he disappeared for six years. He was scared to death that he'd been seen and somebody could recognize him. It took about six years from the Cams incident until he started doing bombs again. I think Cams was in 1987. Six years goes by and then in 1993, he smells two bombs on the same day to two separate people. So when he decided to come back, he sort of came back, you know, with a vengeance, I guess, because I don't recall him ever sending two on the same day. So a few more weeks goes by and his brother, actually his brother's wife, had sort of read about the case, brought it to the attention of her husband, David Kaczynski, and said, oh my god, this sounds like Ted. And can you imagine that? Can you imagine somebody coming to you and saying, we think your brother's a Unabomber, and now are you going to turn him in? So he read the manifesto and he really took a hard look and he did the right thing, did the hard thing. He did the right thing. He had known, I don't know if I had this in the right order, but he reached out for an attorney in Washington, DC who knew an agent in South Carolina. He called that agent in South Carolina. The agent in South Carolina contacted an agent in Washington, DC. Anyhow, David Kaczynski got a 23-page essay that Ted wrote in 1971 and got it to this attorney. And then the attorney contacted, well, we've been contacted, but then we made the arrangements to get together with the attorney and to get the essay and ultimately to talk to David Kaczynski and his wife, who are really nice people. And I really felt bad for him. Anyhow, this essay, this one Linguistic Analysis starts happening. There are a lot of similarities, a lot of the same writing style, but in that essay was the phrase, the sphere of human technology. Let me make sure I got this right. The sphere of human freedom. That's a verbatim quote. You look at the manifesto and that same phrase in there, the sphere of human freedom. That was pretty damning evidence. That's when I think everybody in the Unabom task force started thinking, maybe we have our guy. So there's a series of meetings. I can't really tell you the exact timeline, but at some point, they do end up, they visit Ted Kaczynski's mother with David and his wife and FBI personnel and she goes through some stuff and she gives them some writings and letters that she that she had and there is a phrase and a letter to her. We all say you can't have your cake and eat it too. That's the way most people say it. But in the letter to her, it said, you can't eat your cake and have it too. Well, in the manifesto, there was that phrase, you can't have your cake. I'm sorry, you can't eat your cake and have it too. So there's another linguistic thing besides writing style that they're just verbatim and those aren't things people say very often. It really just didn't think it was coincidence. So that's what really started everything and they started digging. They started looking. Now, we know who he is and also talking to David. Guess what? We find out that Ted grew up in Chicago, which is where we thought the Unabomber was most likely from. He had lived in Salt Lake City. He had worked at the University of Cal at Berkeley. He was all the places where some of the bombs were sent to, dropped off, or mailed from. So, all of a sudden, the dots start connecting. A point came where they decided, okay, we know he's in Montana because his brother helped them build the cabin years and years and years ago. And we obviously, we put up surveillance there, which was pretty hard to do because Lincoln, Montana is not the biggest city in the world. And he was out in the middle of nowhere. He was well known to the locals there. He was like the hermit that lived in the cabin. Obviously, no one had a clue he was a Unabomber. But we couldn't just stop the investigation. We go there. We identified bus drivers. How did he get out? How did he mail his packages? How did he do things? We found bus drivers that recognized him that would take his buses. He'd take 28 hour bus rides sometimes to Melladivice. A librarian. We learned later that the people that he targeted were all done randomly. That's another reason. There's no commonality between the victims. So, and trust me, we checked that out. He'd gone to the library in Lincoln and he would basically look at books and stuff and he would sort of pick out targets at random while he's in the library. It just, we found a hotel that he stayed in like 30 times and the times that he stayed in coincided with a lot of times that he probably had to leave the area to go mail or place a device. So, we think he was like going there getting cleaned up so he can get on a bus or whatever and go somewhere else and mail or plant a device. So, a lot of investigation occurred there. How do you keep that secret? We got a lucky break. At the same time, there is an anti-government group known as the Freeman and they were having to stand off with the FBI in another part of Montana virtually at the same time that we're doing all the stuff with Ted and so it didn't look unusual to all of a sudden all these FBI resources around because everybody just associated it. They were there because of the Freeman. So, that helped us. In the meantime, we set up in the woods around him, A, we can't let them out. We can't let them go out and mail another package and then we want to keep people from going in to that area as well. I want to say I think this is all going on the end of February until actually we serve the search warrant in April. So, they had them under round the clock surveillance for about two months or so.
Dylan Carnahan:That's, there's a lot of information there, Tom. I think, you know, you, a couple of things I want to get into. I mean, first off, you spoke at the beginning a lot about the psychological profile. I mean, when you have someone that's willing to travel 28 hours on a bus that, as you said, is very committed to their ideological beliefs and that's not and it's grounded in action and there's just a lot of things that would be deceptive when investigating this that are just kind of honestly perplexing and I hate to use the word empathize but to kind of imagine to an extent that someone would be that willing and you talk about the victims, how they were kind of random. Can you talk a little bit about who was targeted over the course of this time period?
Tom Nunemaker:Well, he targeted the president of the United Airlines at one time. He sent packages to Boeing Fabrication Center in Washington, state of Washington. You know, he put a bomb on an airplane. I think it was his third bomb that was going from Chicago to Washington, DC. And thank God, there were about 75, 80 people on my plane. It went off, but it started a fire. If it had exploded like it was intended, that plane would have crashed. They were able to make an emergency landing and no one, some people I think were just injured, but nobody was hurt because of the, probably more from smoke inhalation than anything else. I'm just trying to think where I was going with that. He was definitely dedicated. Like I said, he walked the walk, he talked the talk. When you say it took a lot of commitment to take a 28-hour bus ride, what kind of commitment do you think it took to live in a 10 by 14 cabin? And I've been in it. My bedroom closet is bigger than his cabin. And 25 years, no water, no electricity, no nothing. Everything was made by hand. This is another reason he's so hard to catch. Not only is he a lone wolf, not only is he a victim's pick randomly, all of his materials were made from items you'd get anywhere or from a dumpster or from, he didn't use anything special. He made everything by hand because he had no power to use tools. And so even when you would find some remnants of a bomb at one of the crime scenes, they were so easy to acquire. It's not like you can trace it right back to the manufacturer and see who that manufacturer sold it to and try to locate somebody doing reverse engineering, so to speak. He was good. He took a bus because guess what? When you get on a bus, nobody checks your, especially back then, you know, you're pretty anonymous. You get on a bus, you go somewhere, you get off, get on a bus, you come back. It's not a big deal. I mean, he actually changed the way things were mailed. He actually changed the way things, airlines. This is long before the events of 2001. There is a time he actually almost shut the airline industry down when he wrote one time and said, you've got to publish this. If you don't do it in six days, I'm going to blow up another aircraft. I mean, people, I remember that time. People were just freaking out. Nobody wanted to fly. The airlines didn't want to operate. The security just went through the roof. You know, when you think about he's one guy and the power that he wielded, it's phenomenal. It's amazing what he was able to do. And you look back at the scope of things, 16 bombings, only three people were ever killed, several more obviously were injured. But I think that's what scared people is the randomness of it. So he did a lot of stuff with airlines. So people thought maybe he worked in the airline industry. Maybe he built airplanes. Maybe he was a, he sent things to universities. So maybe he was a scholar. Maybe he worked at these universities. Maybe he sent things to advertising executives. He sent stuff. I actually think he killed this gentleman, the president of California Forestry Association. There were two people that had the last name of Wood, Percy Wood. I think he was the president of United Airlines. So some people thought he had this fascination with the ecology. He had this fascination with protecting the trees because the word wood sort of dropped, popped up every once in a while. There are a lot of roads that had to be gone down. There are a lot of roads that were dead ends. But again, you have to check everyone out. And that's what's so manpower intensive.
Dylan Carnahan:So there's one of the things, if you could highlight more for us, I know that it's not always easy to capture the essence, zeitgeist, spirit, whatever you want to call it, or emotions of that time period. And so over the course of such a long duration, what was kind of the public sentiment and media coverage like of these events that were unfolding?
Tom Nunemaker:You know, obviously there's always a reaction after an event. And then when he came out and threatened to blow up an airplane that they didn't publish a manifesto, honestly, it sort of ebb and flowed. Again, like you said, disappeared for six years at one point. So people sort of forgot it. When someone disappears off the radar like that, they usually think they're dead or incarcerated. He wasn't. Again, I think he was just scared because he'd been seen in Salt Lake City and a composite came out. I got to give the media, the New York Times and Washington Post credit because they really didn't want to do it. They didn't want it. They did not want to establish a precedent of being held hostage by a terrorist. You have to do this or I'm going to do that. And then even if they exceeded to that, was it going to come back later and make another demand? Was it going to set a precedent for other criminals and other terrorists? So in that sense, the media, I think, did really good. Media is like putting a composite out or polishing a manifesto. Again, it's always a two edged sword. When you go out to media, that force multiplier, that expands our eyes and ears. There's people out there looking that we can't be everywhere at once. Right. But then again, you had 10,000 people contact you and saying, I think I know who the Unabomber is. So it just, let me tell you what, if I get this right, there's a young agent, I think her name is Molly Flint. She worked at the FBI headquarters. And you know how many times the Unabom task force, dozens of times a day, the phone would ring. I know who the Unabomber is. The Unabomber is my brother, et cetera, et cetera. So when David Kaczynski actually did what he had to do and contact the attorney and the attorney said, and he sent him to 23 page essay, and this agent, Molly Flynn, came over to pick it up from the Washington field office from the attorney in DC and get it to the Unabom task force. And she had read the manifesto. You know what a big fear is? A big fear is, because I mean, we had to, I think I sent you an email. There were like 175 databases we were using. There are tens of thousands of pages of documents. I mean, just amazing. You know what the biggest fear was? That we had something that told us who the Unabomber might be, but was so buried. That's the other thing. Even working three shows, around the clock, doing all this analysis and computer analysis, your fear is we've got that information under one of these three, four, five foot stacks of paper, and we don't know it yet. Thank God that wasn't the case. But Molly Flynn took a look at that, and she had the presence of mind. There was just something about that. She contacted the Unabomb Task Force, talked to one of the supervisors there, and said, you need to look at this. Don't let this just take this route and be addressed in order. You know what I mean? Because nobody knew how important it was at that time. And so we gave that priority because it really concerned her that much. And that's when we first noticed those similarities to the manifesto. And that's what got everything headed in the right direction.
Dylan Carnahan:No, it's certainly the magnitude, right? The magnitude of information that you're continually having to process and vet and qualify those leads. And then the fear base that potentially you've missed something or maybe the fear that you have so much information that you haven't gotten the right information yet.
Tom Nunemaker:Right, right.
Dylan Carnahan:Now to get to what you kind of walked through earlier, some kind of critical points leading up to kind of the once you had narrowed your sights in on Ted Kaczynski, you're kind of surveilling the area. Can you walk us through the events leading up to his capture and the strategies that were used that led to his arrest?
Tom Nunemaker:Yeah, it's public knowledge that at some point there was a leak. I mean, you talk about keeping the lid down tight. Nobody wants anything to get out. Obviously, if Ted Kaczynski knew that we had identified him, he'd probably destroy evidence. He might kill himself, might blow himself up, disappear in the wind. So that's why we had a perimeter set up for about a month and a half. There was a leak. If I recall, Dan Rather called the director of the FBI and said, we understand that you have identified Ted Kaczynski as Unabomber. And the director asked for 24 hours before anything came out. I wasn't there. I assumed that was agreed upon. And so that sort of forced us, we got to serve the search warrant, which we'd spent weeks and weeks and weeks developing probable cause. The search warrant affidavit usually contains things like, okay, pen register information, who's calling who, Title III information, recorded conversations, criminal conversations, surveillances, I saw the bad guy meet with that bad guy, eyewitness accounts, etc. etc. etc. We didn't have a lot of forensic information or evidence. We had more of this behavioral stuff. And it's hard to put that into a search warrant like you can just physical forensic evidence. Anyhow, we got the search warrant. It was executed. He lived alone. He didn't trust anybody. There was a forced, I want to say, ranger, I apologize, I don't remember his name. And he and an agent, Max Noll, who had been working on the Unabom Task Force in San Francisco forever, and I think another agent from that area in Montana, they based, once the decision was made, we had to search a search warrant, they were worried about two things. Does he have a fail safe system? If we knock on the door and say FBI, is a cabin just going to explode? Is it going to be a barricade situation? Is it going to be a Waco or Ruby Ridge? I mean, they were planning for all sorts of contingencies. The idea was to try to get up there, with someone he knew, I apologize, I should know his name, and who would get him to come out of the cabin. The biggest thing they wanted to do was get him outside the cabin. So they went up and the forest, I'll say ranger, park and services, something like that. He yelled at Ted and Ted knew who he was. They'd had dealings in the past. And he said, I have some gentlemen here. They want to do a survey, something with your land, et cetera, this and that. Can you come out and talk to us? And he sort of hesitated, but then he sort of opened the door, sort of peeked out. And again, the guy he knew said, come out, we need to talk to you. Everything's okay. We just want to talk to you. He started to come out and then he started to go back in, at which time the ranger just grabbed him and pulled him outside. They were not going to let him go back inside that cabin. And then sort of the tussle is on. And then Max Noll, the FBI agent, they get everything under control. They get him handcuffed. He's not arrested at that point. He's being detained at that point. So now they want to execute the search warrant. Well, we had spent weeks getting ready for the execution of the search warrant. We brought in military specialists, our own bomb people, et cetera, et cetera. Forensic analysis, evidence response teams. I mean, and now the SWAT went from containing him there to now everybody knew and the media was running with it is now SWAT is keeping everybody out. So they didn't go in the cabin, I think, for about 24, 48 hours. They were worried about him. He's a bomber. They were worried about him having booby traps and stuff on his property, booby trap inside the cabin, et cetera, et cetera. So it was done in phases. They had to clear the property. They had to clear the cabin before you can even let investigators and evidence collection people go inside the cabin. Then when they went inside the cabin, they found, I think it was a 40,000-page handwritten journal, which described as bomb experiments. It had a lot of stuff. He loved to write about everything. He talked about some of the Unabom crimes. He talked about his philosophy. I mean, 40,000 pages handwritten. They found bomb-making components, and then they found one live bomb ready to be mailed underneath his bed. This stuff was invaluable at trial when he went to trial, I think, in 1998. Hopefully, I covered that for you.
Dylan Carnahan:And again, this is just kind of the magnitude grows further, right? Because you've done all this investigative work, and then now you have all of this forensic material, and then you've got to investigate that further, right? Because at this point, detained, can you talk about how that proceeds and how you approach things, knowing that you're going to have a trial after that?
Tom Nunemaker:I'm going to reach for a piece of paper and try not to do this. I don't want to mess up the numbers. I think I may have sent something like this to you. In preparation for trial, here's some of the things that they put together. We had over 36,000 volumes of information. We were using 175 different computer databases. We had what were called events records. We had 12,000 of those. We had a system called XiIndex, which is a full-text document retrieval system. So we had 60,000 documents in that system so we could retrieve them very quickly if and when needed for trial. We had 1,400 actual physical exhibits, and we had like 25,000 other pages of evidence, I guess, of documentary value. I remember going into the garage in San Francisco, and this is a massive building, and they just had tables and tables and tables and tables set up in there, and all the stuff was on these tables. I mean, it is incredible. The volume of information, because now the FBI's job, not really done, but now the US. Attorney's Office, they're the people to prosecute. So now they're dealing with all this stuff so that they can get a successful prosecution. And as I said earlier, it wasn't the forensic evidence that actually led us to Ted, but it's the forensic evidence at the end which gets them convicted.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and can you talk a little bit about the sentencing and what happens with that prosecution?
Tom Nunemaker:Yeah, there was a time, his original attorneys wanted to plead him innocent by reason of insanity, and that infuriated him. I think he actually fired his original attorneys. He didn't consider himself crazy. And I've read many books of other people, and other people don't consider him crazy either. I mean, it's amazing how polarizing Ted can be. Obviously, there's something wrong with the guy that kills people. Obviously, there's something wrong with the guy who lives in a 10 by 14 foot cabin for 25 years. Then on the other side, he probably had one of the highest IQs of anybody I've ever met in my life. But when his attorneys decide to do that, because they were trying to get them spared from the death penalty, and his brother and sister-in-law had always said, we'll cooperate, but we don't want our brother to get the death penalty. And you can't make that guarantee. That's up to the US. Attorney's Office. But FBI people dealing with them obviously said, we will do what we can. We'll let him know how much you cooperate, and hopefully that will help your brother, Ted, out. Anyhow, ultimately, he decided to plead guilty. And he pled guilty, and I don't think he wanted to, but he did, because they made an agreement. He pleads guilty, he won't get the death penalty. So I think he pled guilty to 13 of the 16 bombings. I think he received something like 8 or 9 life sentences. So he was never going to get out of prison. And then they sent him to a place called Supermax. It's in Florence, Colorado. And Supermax is, nobody's going to escape from that. But it also had an interesting side. It had a little area that became known as Bombers Row, because Ramza Yousef was there, who was the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center bombing. Timothy McVeigh was there, who blew up the Murray Building in Oklahoma City until his execution. And I think ultimately, oh my God, who's the guy? He blew up Centennial Park and the Atlanta Olympics and started blowing up abortion clinics. And then he was another lone wolf who hid out in the woods in North Carolina for five years until he was finally caught. So he was there. So they were referred to this area in Supermax as Bombers Row. I can only imagine. Can you imagine the conversations those guys probably have with each other if they were allowed to have conversations? But I think they did because I remember somewhere I wrote that Ted Kaczynski said, I didn't agree with everything that Tim McVeigh did. He thought it was a little too random. He killed 200 people, including kids and stuff. He goes, I understand why, but I don't agree with what he did. And so obviously they I think they must have been able to talk to each other. But what a group of people.
Dylan Carnahan:That's that's just very odd. Like you said, just to even think about that, that you have this collective of people that have perpetrators of common, you know, odd crimes and they have almost similar psychological profiles in a way to that find themselves in the same spot. Yeah.
Tom Nunemaker:Well, you know, Terry Turchie, I think he left before Ted Kaczynski was actually played guilty. He was then immediately sent to oversee the investigation in North Carolina because that guy was a true lone wolf. And his name is going to come to me. I apologize. And they applied the principles that they used, that they learned during the Unabom investigation to him. And part of it is be relentless, keep the pressure on. Luckily, he had actually been identified after the bombing of an abortion clinic. As the story goes, everyone else is running towards the bombing, and some alert civilian saw this one guy sort of walk away from it, which was highly unusual, get in the car and drive away. He gets the license tag. So they run the license tag and they find out who this individual is. So unlike the Unabomber, we knew who Eric Rudolph was, and unlike the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, if you remember, he got pulled over. I think he didn't have a license plate or something on his car. He's driving away from the bombing in Oklahoma City. So an alert state trooper pulled him over and next thing you know. So he's captured. He was a woodsman and he was a survivalist and he was a lone wolf. And he lived off the land. He would break into people's cabins and do all sorts of stuff. But by keeping the pressure on, Terry brought in massive amounts of manpower in that one because based on his behavioral analysis, they knew what he would try to do, where he would probably try to hide, how he would try to survive. And the pressure was so relentless that at some point, I mean he was virtually starving. So then he would start sneaking into little local towns and trying to find clothes, go through dumpsters, get anything to eat, et cetera. And so that's how he got caught. A sort of fairly new young police officer found him falling around the back of a store at night and arrested him. And it turns out he's the bomber we've been looking for for five years. But was that luck that he got caught? No, it was the five years of pressure. We kept agents in the woods, basically around the clock, and it sort of forced him at some point. He was starving to death. He just had to come out, and that's ultimately what led to his capture.
Dylan Carnahan:Are there any other lessons that were learned from the Unabom case that have informed subsequent FBI operations? It sounds like the psychological profiling played a large role, as well as the thought process on how to apply manpower, but you also have said that even in the aviation community, like in postal service, this has changed policies in a lot of different areas.
Tom Nunemaker:I think what we learned, especially in a complex investigation, especially in lone wolf type investigations, that number one, Terry was a big believer in thinking outside the box. I really appreciated that. He was a big believer. I mentioned this before, separating fact from fiction from mythology. An investigation goes on for so long, these myths sort of are created, and you got to deal with that and get through it. A big believer in picking the right people for the right team, he's a big believer in interagency cooperation. But I think that he saw that the traditional FBI criminal investigation wasn't quite going to work as well in this one. Well, it hadn't for 16, 17 years. I mean, sort of the proof is in the pudding. But he liked to integrate behavior analysis with the collection, gathering of forensic evidence if you can. He just thinks you had to use all of it. You can't want to exclude one for the other. I think the biggest thing I saw, he really wanted people to use their imagination. He just didn't want people to fly off. I mean, you had to have some basis for it. We had some people who had some very creative ideas. Unfortunately, they didn't lead to the Unabomber. But he allowed his people that latitude to do that. Terry was, I really liked Terry. You can probably tell that. I watched him work, great leader. It's just amazing what he could get out of his people. He had the right people, the right place and the right time. He had people that wanted to be there. He didn't care. Some people worked on Unabom for 10 years. They go, it's dead end. I want to get off. I quit. Well, he slowly replaced those types of people with people that wanted to be there and wanted to work and were going to stay there until the guy got captured. I tell you what, if you think about it, Terry came on in 1994 and got captured in 1996. So Terry did in two years what they hadn't been able to do for 16 years prior to him taking over the task force. I think Terry would... I don't want to put words in Terry's mouth. You're always fighting the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy generally is entrenched in traditional, we have to do it this way. And they don't always like people that sort of want to, again, think outside the box. But I think Terry's right. You have to think outside the box. Traditional way, bureaucratic way, is not always the best way. It's necessary. You have to have oversight. But the problem is, and the good thing was, with few exceptions, we didn't really have headquarters ATF getting in an issue with the headquarters FBI. And we didn't have headquarters US Postal Service Inspection Service getting in issues with ATF. For the most part, and this is part of my job back at headquarters level, was try to keep everybody playing well in the sandbox together. And there were bumps along the way. I mean, nothing is ever 100% perfect. But Terry was very good at getting everybody to see the goal, to cooperate with each other, to contribute resources. You know, it's one thing to go in the FBI and say, I need 100 more agents, I need 200 more analysts. It's another thing to go to ATF and to the US Postal Inspection Service and to other agencies and say, I need more, I need more, I need more. I mean, there were some people, I remember, it's only one guy. Why are you spending, the expenditure resources, the money, I mean, there's estimates that the FBI spent almost $50 million. I don't know if that's correct or not. Though I know we spent a lot of money. And then people go, it's one guy. But if you think of what, again, what that one guy was able to do, it's sort of just a fascinating case from start to finish.
Dylan Carnahan:That it is, it is. And based upon your experiences, what's the best way for people to learn more about this case outside of our discussion?
Tom Nunemaker:Well, I'm glad you asked that. I'm not trying to sell a book because I didn't write the book. But we just try to encapsulize 18 year long investigation with tens of thousands of pieces of information into this podcast. If you really want to read a good book, this is Terry's book. I highly recommend it. It's called Hunting The American Terrorist. And it's a two part book. It details as much as possible everything that occurred in that investigation, especially from Terry taking over in 1994. It tells you his thought process, what he did, how he revamped the task force. It's a fascinating read. It really is. The second half is based on a study. Kathy Puckett was an agent in San Francisco that Terry knew and worked. And she wasn't from the behavioral analysis unit back at headquarters. I don't even know if they called that anymore. But she was into profiling and behavioral analysis. And he depended greatly on her. And she ended up after this case and the other case in North Carolina, producing a paper. And sort of the last third of this book is the paper she presented, the best way, the things to consider when you're looking for terrorists like this. As lessons learned, best practices from everything they had gained from the experience of work in the Unabomber case, what they saw in the Oakbomb case, and everything they learned in the Atlanta bombing case. And if you remember, they had, I don't know they, but somebody had profiled a security guard and he was under intense scrutiny as the person who was the bomber in Centennial Park in Atlanta. He was the wrong guy. He fit too many of the boxes you can check real easy. And so they zeroed in on him and that was not good. And then it turns out to be this true lone wolf who he used to, I think he referred to himself as the Army of God. Because a lot of these people, even Kaczynski, if you remember, he had put the initials FC on some things and he referred to himself when he wrote as the Freedom Club. So that was just a way of him trying to say, it's more than me. I belong to a group. There's a lot of us out there. Well, the Army of God is the same thing, but they were both true lone wolf terrorists who didn't associate with anybody. So it's a good book. If you want all the details that I've left out, I would encourage you to read that book and then you can get an insight. Kathy wrote a great paper that is very interesting if you want to get into the mind of this type of person.
Dylan Carnahan:We'll be sure to include the things that you mentioned, Tom, within the show notes for people to check out. When I, Tom, when I think of you in my mind, okay, and I think about your career, being that you served in the Marine Corps, the extensive time that you spent at the FBI, and that you're a firearms instructor, one word comes to mind, and that word for me is service. You have lived a life full of service, and you continue to do so. So I want to thank you for not just sharing your time and knowledge today. I want to thank you about how you've lived your life, and just say thank you.
Tom Nunemaker:You know, I appreciate it. It's nice of you to say that, and I just didn't do anything that most other people don't do. Probably my thing was I did have an extensive background, and I was a street agent, SWAT investigator, et cetera. And it was funny that my role in probably the biggest case I was ever associated with, Unabom, I was the admin guy, you know, and for a street agent, that's like, oh my God, you know, because I wanted to be there knocking on doors and interviewing people and doing things like that, just wasn't my role. And I just hope I helped them in some small way. As for the other stuff, my service, I loved it. So I appreciate you saying that, but I'd have paid to do all the things I've done. And it just, it's been fun.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Tom. We talked about the role the media played, the psychological profile of the Unabomber, and the sheer volume of information collected. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Tom mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.