THE mystery ail bomb campaign began in spring 1978, when a package was sent to a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Unopened, it was sent back to a return address at Northwestern University where it blew up, injuring a policeman. A year later, a second bomb wounded a student at North westerns technological institute. Since then, the serial bomber has struck 16 times, killing three people and injuring 23 more.
The last victim was Gilbert Murray, a timber industry lobbyist, blown up at his office in April 1995.
The bomber targeted university professors, airline executives and technology researchers, hence the FBI code name "unabomber".
The FBI's 17 year investigation brought in 200 suspects, more than 10,000 phone calls to an emergency phone line, cost $50 million and occupied one million work hours, but the FBI didn't have a single strong lead.
A special Unabomb team had its HQ at San Francisco federal building, where 200 agents worked full time on the case, feeding data into a huge parallel processing computer borrowed from the Pentagon. The agents sifted through school lists, drivers licence registers, lists of people who took certain books out of libraries in California, but no hard evidence came up.
The meticulous bomber scraped the labels off batteries so they could not be traced, used stamps long past their issue dates and wires that were out of production. He made his own explosives out of commonly available chemicals, left no fingerprints and used handmade components, spending 80 hours on a single customised screw.
The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma in April 1995 eclipsed the unabomer's campaign this drew him into the open. Days later, he sent a deadly package to the president of the California Forestry Association.
It doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us anytime soon," he wrote to the New York Times. The "we" referred to the bomber's alleged organisation, the Freedom Club. Soon after, he threatened to blow up an aircraft at LA airport, shutting down air traffic during the busy holiday period. The postal authorities ordered all post boxes to be sealed up as panic gripped California, the principal target of the unabomer's rage.
He promised to end the bombings if the New York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000 word manifesto and a follow Up article in each of the following three years.
The manifesto was published last September, titled "Industrial Society And Its Future". There were long queues at newspaper stands, various reprints in other newspapers and a unabomer page set up on the Internet's Worldwide Web site. The myth had been consolidated.
The text could have been a fifth of the length and needed a good editor, but the analysis of technology led society rang true, touching on fears fast coming to the forefront of US popular thought.
Todd Haynes's recent film Safe, about a woman who discovers she is allergic to modern society, is one example, while seminars and retreats on "emotional maintenance" and "owning your own life" are all the rage in the US. The green movement, New Ageism, citizen militias and scores of other groups also highlight the absence of citizen participation and control in the running of society and our endangered environment.
The unabomer manifesto blamed society's ills on "the break down of natural small scale communities such as the extended family, the village or tribe."
The author called for a return to "wild nature", where people would sacrifice consumer drives for increased autonomy in small rural based communities.
Advertising and marketing techniques were blamed for "making people feel they need things their grandparents never dreamed of requiring "serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs".
Where the manifesto parted ways with mainstream thought was in its call for a revolution which would bring about the total destruction of all technology.
"You can't eat your cake and have it too," read the text, a potpourri of down home folksiness and high blown anarchist rhetoric.
The FBI gambled on the publication of the document giving crucial clues to the bomber's identity.
Six months later, they are confident they have their man.
On April 3rd, Theodore John Kaczynski was arrested at his log cabin in Lincoln, Montana.
The FBI combed the hut for a week, then dismantled it and hauled it off, log by log, to an army base.
Information began to leak suggesting that Kaczynski was undoubtedly the unabomer.
Three typewriters were found, 10 notebooks with writings and diagrams of explosive devices, logs of experiments to determine the optimal design of pipe bombs and a finished package bomb.
In the weeks following the arrest of Kaczynski, it was revealed that the suspect had been identified by his brother, David, who had recognised Ted's writing style in the manifesto and contacted a private investigator who examined the writings and contacted the FBI.
"It was the toughest decision of my life," said David Kaczynski, a social worker living in New York. "My concern was that if I were in a position to prevent more lives from being lost, I couldn't do otherwise."
In the weeks preceding the arrest, FBI agents disguised as lumberjacks and postal workers searched the area surrounding Kaczynski's cabin the forest was wired with sensors and microphones while snipers and satellites completed the surveillance operation.
When the agents moved in on the morning of April 3rd, they found a middle aged, bearded hermit living in a simple hut. The plywood home had an outhouse, a root cellar below and two walls filled with books, including Shakespeare, Thackeray and bomb making manuals. He made his own candles and bread, grew potatoes and parsnips, hunted rabbits and lived on $200 a year.
His brother and mother sent gifts of money which enabled him to make occasional trips beyond the cabin.
Ted Kaczynski was handcuffed, taken into custody and charged with possession of explosives. The FBI began to reconstruct the past 18 years of his life, matching the unabomer's movements to his.
Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, the son of a Polish sausage maker. A shy boy who rarely mixed with other children, Ted read scientific journals and was nicknamed "the walking brain". He was close to his mother, who encouraged academic brilliance and was proud of the boy.
Ted joined school clubs and played the trombone, skipped two classes and won a place at Harvard University at the age of 16. His classmates recall an obsessive loner whose room was "knee deep in papers and stank of sour food".
AT 20 years of age, Ted had a Harvard degree and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to complete his PhD studies and then to Berkeley and a lecture post.
The atmosphere in late 1960s academic circles was one of rebellion, as peace, love and Vietnam dominated the scene. In June 1967 Ted won a departmental prize for best PhD dissertation of that year on boundary functions, an arcane branch of pure mathematics. His thesis adviser was one of 43 of the nation's top mathematicians who signed a letter urging their colleagues to forgo military research.
While Ted Kaczynski never showed any strong feelings about the activism around him, the campus riots and protests must have had a significant impact on the young academic.
On January 20th 1969, the young professor wrote a terse, two sentence letter of resignation from his post at Berkeley University, setting his departure date five months hence, the day Richard Nixon was sworn in as US president.
A close friend of Kaczynski's father, child psychologist Ralph K. Meister, claimed it was young Ted's fear that his students would become makers of atomic bombs that prompted him to resign.
Kaczynski then travelled around the country, bought land in Montana, built his cabin and lived on what he could grow or kill.
His solitary lifestyle attracted little attention in Montana, the USA's largest tract of unspoiled wilderness. He would cycle into the nearest town, buying food staples and catching up on news at the library. Apart from occasional odd jobs and trips out of town, Ted spent weeks on end inside his cabin.
In 1990 his father committed suicide. Ted rang home from the post office in Lincoln, Montana, offering condolences to his mother. In a subsequent exchange of letters, Ted accused his mother of being "more interested in having a brilliant son than seeing that son happy and fulfilled". Ted also recalled a painful teenage incident, in which his class picked sides for a game and left him outside. "I am crying as I write this," he said.
In the weeks following the arrest, a flood of FBI leaks linked Kaczynski to the bombings. Ted's lawyers moved to dismiss the case. The judge disagreed but ordered the FBI to guard silence.
The FBI revealed that copies of a 1907 Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, had been sent to scholars hoping for insights into the mind of the bomber. In the novel, a professor abandons academia to build bombs. "I've the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone," the professor says.
Conrad's given name was Teodore Jozef Korzeniowski, remarkably close to Ted J. Kaczynski, who was an admirer of Conrad's work. In the novel, the narrator muses over the motivation of the bomber, concluding that the revolutionary saw himself as a "moral agent . . . procuring for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige ... perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind the peace of soothed vanity."
The US media has built up a portrait of Kaczynski as a friendless, twisted serial killer on a par with madman Jeffrey Dahmer, omitting any references to the political manifesto.
"Evil genius", "a cold killer" who "even the dogs hated," the press said. Newshounds produced the story of a former sweetheart who dumped Kaczynski after a few dates and got obscene limericks in return.
In fact, when questioned the woman said she had a couple of dates with Kaczynski they baked apple pie together and parted on reasonable terms.
The FBI pressed both a local librarian and bookseller to reveal Kaczynski's reading tastes, but neither would reveal the information.
"I liked him," was Lincoln librarian Beverly Coleman's response.
Even Ted's brother David, who led the FBI to the unabomer suspect, broke his silence to defend his brother, citing an "uncompromising intellect, a love of wild places, compassion for children and startling moments of kindness".
Last week, Ted Kaczynski was charged in Sacramento, California, for four of the attacks blamed on the unabomer, including two, a decade apart, which killed people.
The killing of timber industry lobbyist Murray in April 1995 is covered by the federal death penalty statute and Kaczynski faces execution if convicted.
He has remained silent so far. The unabomer debate continues through the Internet, where fans suggested his name be placed on the ballot as a write in candidate in the November US presidential elections.
As the trial proceeds, prosecutors believe Kaczynski is on a fast track to the electric chair.
Last month, two 14 year old boys in Florida built a bomb and hid it in the roof of their classroom, almost killing a teacher. The two will be tried as adults and face 20 years in prison, a sure sign that the apparent closing of the unabomer saga is just the prologue to another chapter of the same book.