THEODORE "Ted" Kaczynski, a former Harvard graduate and University of California mathematics professor suspected of being the US's deadly "Unabomber", was yesterday indicted on a first formal charge by federal prosecutors in Montana.
According to FBI officials, the man they believe carried out an 18 year campaign of mail bombings across the country was indicted in the courthouse at the state capital of Helena on a single count of possessing a bomb. The device was apparently discovered by investigators as they searched Mr Kaczynski's remote cabin near the small town of Lincoln yesterday afternoon.
The charge means that Mr
Kaczynski, detained when he tried to prevent the search, can continue to be held in custody while further evidence is amassed at the cabin - evidence the FBI hopes will conclusively identify him as the Unabomber, responsible for killing three people and wounding 23 others in 16 attacks, the first of them in May 1978.
For a dozen years now Mr Kaczynski (53) has lived as a hermit in the brick and board shack, without plumbing or electricity, using his excrement to fertilise his vegetable garden. He was an eccentric, a Harvard graduate who would ride a bicycle along the muddy roads into the remote Montana township of Lincoln (population 530), mainly to borrow what few learned books were available at the public library.
His beard was straggly, his clothes ill fitting, often torn. People mostly liked him but left him alone, for Montana is a place where privacy is respected.
"I think most of us are rooting that this isn't the guy," said one of his neighbours, Mr Larry Butler. "I don't believe it's him. If he's so educated, why did he live like that?" To which investigators have a simple answer. He lived like that because he was the Unabomber.
He fits the Unambomber's profile elaborated by the FBI with uncanny precision. Just as the bureau predicted, he is a middle aged white male, well educated and almost certainly with a failed university career behind him, who mostly shunned human society to concentrate on his two preferred pursuits: developing his theory of the calamity to which the industrial revolution was leading mankind - and killing people with devilishly constructed letter bombs.
The Unabomber seems to have had special links with university life in three places: Chicago (where the suspect's family lives), Utah, and northern California. On each score Mr Kaczynski fits the bill. After Harvard, he took courses at the university of Chicago, before taking a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan (where his former professor yesterday described him as "very serious and very able").
The first attack in 1978 was a bomb addressed to a Chicago university. The last of the 16 attributed to the Unabomber came a year ago in Sacramento, California, when Mr Gilbert Murray, the president of the California Forestry Association, was killed when he opened a package in Sacramento.
Exulting in his apparent mastery of the FBI, the master criminal made his mistake, in the form of a 35,000 word treatise on the future of industrial society, which he submitted to the Washington Post and New York Times.
If they published the rambling, anti technology manifesto, the writer said, he would cease his campaign. After much soul searching the two newspapers did so on September 20th, 1995, on the advice of the FBI.
Relatives in Chicago were struck by similarities between some of Mr Kaczynski's earlier writings and the tract, and eventually his brother informed the FBI.