April 3, 1996

Editor's note 2021: The BVD originally published this story, a look back at the arrest of Teoheodore Kaczynski 20 years later, in our March 31, 2016. I've included more recent images from 2018 as an addtioanl

Editor's note: I know full well many people would just as soon never hear the name Ted Kaczynski again. While Kaczynski deserves no press, the story of his arrest and it's impact on the community, like it or not, is a fascinating and indelible part of the town's history and it isn't a simple one to tell. This week looks at how people saw him while he lived here and at his arrest. Next weeks issue will look at the fallout, both good and bad, that came out of it.

April 3,1996.

A lot of Lincoln residents may not recall the date, specifically, but most who were here 20 years ago have a pretty vivid memory of what happened.

Just a few miles south of town, in a somewhat secluded draw, an 18 year hunt for the nations most notorious terrorist came to an end and Lincoln found itself smack dab in the center of the media spotlight.

Nearly everyone who paid any attention to the news at all back then knew at least a little about the Unabomber. No one expected to find him here.

"The FBI had a list of about 2000 suspects, but Ted Kaczynski wasn't one of them." Said Jerry Burns, the retired Forest Service law enforcement officer whose ruse to draw Kaczynski out of his cabin finally put him in handcuffs.

Kaczynski made the list in February 1996. David Kaczynski read "Industrial Society and its Future," better known as the Unabomber Manifesto some time after it was published the previous September and began comparing it to some of his brother's writings and alerted federal authorities.

At the time the FBI thought the Unabomber was working out of San Francisco and the idea he might be in a small Montana town at first seemed unlikely, but the more they looked at Kaczynski, things started to add up.

When news first broke that the Unabomber had been arrested in Lincoln, he wasn't immediately identified by name. Susie Gehring. whose father in 1971 sold the Kaczynski brothers the 1.4 acres where Ted lived, heard about it while she was in Helena. In her head she ran through her personal list of Lincoln's most likely suspects. Kaczynski sure wasn't on it.

When word finally got out people here were stunned. Like most small towns, Lincoln has always drawn its share of loners and misanthropes, people seeking refuge from the rest of the world and Kaczynski was, as KD Feeback said, just part of the local color.

Feeback, who was working for Phelps Dodge at the time of Kaczynski's arrest joked that they considered him the true harbinger of spring when he'd first appear in town on his bike every year.

Ted wasn't the only person to reappear in the spring. Miners in the area who rarely made it to town in the winter started to show up as well. "All the old miners and stuff would come down," Teresa Garland said. She managed Garland's Town and County and talked about gardening, but little else, with Kaczynski. "They had a certain sort of warmth about them. He just didn't."

Krissi Hagen didn't know him, but her mother and stepfather, Eileen and Dick Lundberg, dealt with Kaczynski while they ran the Lincoln Stage.

"I know he did catch a lot of rides with Mom and Dick. That was back in the days when they would give people rides to town to do their shopping or whatever they needed to do. Ted was one of those guys," she said. "They got along with the guy. He was always friendly, nice, wasn't rude. They had no clue what he was up to of course. They took him to town a lot, probably carrying the stuff he was mailing out and not even realizing it."

Lincoln Librarian Sherri Wood considered Kaczynski a friend. He spent a lot of time at the library and got to know her and her son Danny better than probably anyone in town. They both had a tough time with his arrest. The Ted they had known helped Danny with his math homework and volunteered to help pack up the library when it was remodeled. "The only reason I claimed him as a friend was because he had been a friend before all this started," she said.

Wendy Gehring, who with her husband Butch ran the Gerhing Lumber sawmill just a few hundred yards from Kaczynski's cabin, saw far more of him than she liked and had a dramatically different opinion. "I thought he was weird. I thought he was an asshole. It was obvious he thought I was a lower life form. But I didn't think he was the Unabomber," she said. "Sherri really liked him, but Sherri saw a different side of him. The side I saw, in my belief was the true Ted, the Ted who's kicking the dog, the Ted who's talking down to me and just thinking everybody's stupid".

By and large, though, most just remember him riding his bike with a stripe of mud down his back, or at the library; or maybe at Garlands or the grocery store.

Bob Armstrong recalled that not long after he and his wife Trudy moved to town, he saw Kaczynski on his bike and was told he was just an "old hermit."

In short, for a hermit, he was something of a fixture in Lincoln – if a standoffish one.

To learn more about Kaczynski's movements, Helena FBI agent Tom McDaniel turned to Burns, who had lived in Lincoln most of his life and new the area well. They had done a lot of training with the FBI, even giving their SWAT team a horsemanship school. "We worked closely with each other on some arrest warrants around the county," Burns said.

McDaniel brought Max Noel and David Weber, agent's with the Unabomber Task Force to Lincoln to meet Burns. Through February and March they worked to make sure Kaczynski was home, get a good look at his cabin for the search warrant and not tip anyone off about their presence.

For the feds, the activity associated Phelps Dodge Mining's plan for a major gold mine near Lincoln provided a great cover. No one gave too much thought to a few more out-of-towners poking around. They even ensconced married FBI agents at the Sportsman's Motel, posing as freelance journalists. Burns said their job was to watch the bus line that once stopped here to make sure Kaczynski didn't leave town.

Burns called his high school classmate Butch Gerhing for help. "As the investigation went along I told Butch I had a guy interested in lumber and he was going to be at the sawmill in the morning. That was Max Noel." They told Butch a half truth- that Kaczynski was suspected of mailing threatening letters. With his help they were able to verify that Kaczynski was still holed up in his cabin. Wendy said at one point he even went out on his own with a video camera and got footage of the area, which she said was used to determine where the FBI could position their people.

Since they only had a search warrant for Kaczynski's property, the original plan-the safer plan-was to detain him as he rode his bike into town.

That plan went south when Dan Rather and CBS News called the FBI. "(They) said 'we know you're on the Unabomber trail and we know it's in western Montana and we'll give you 24 hours before we break the story,'" Burns recalled. "In that 24 hours they brought in a SWAT team from Sacramento and a bomb squad from Fort Lewis, Washington."

In the early morning of April 3, Burns joined the FBI agents at the Seven-up Ranch.

"The Seven-Up wasn't open in the winter. They didn't know what was going on. They thought it was a big poaching ring that was in Lincoln," Burns said. "They had a satellite dish and Judge Lovell and Janet Reno were reviewing the search warrant."

Knowing the crusty spring snow would never allow them to put the sneak on Kaczynski, they shifted from a tactical approach to something downright theatrical. Burns took advantage of the fact that there was a mining claim on some private land just above Kaczynski's property and outfitted McDaniel, Noel and Weber in surveyor's vests and marking tape.

Using the Gehring sawmill as a staging area, they waited for the swat team to get into place

Wendy Gehring, who watched events unfold from the roof of the sawmill with Butch, said it seemed to take forever. Through it all she was sticking to her belief that Kaczynski was actually DB Cooper.

Showtime

"Max and Joe and Tom and I drove as far as we could up the road and just walked up to his cabin, real noisy, talking about the survey," Burns said.

The plan was to draw him out by saying they needed to verify his property lines."We had his tax records and everything. If he wouldn't come out of the cabin we were gong to take him down inside the cabin," Burns said." A little bit before his cabin I started yelling 'Ted, Ted, are you home?'"

When Kaczynski poked his head out Burns told him the men were with the mining company and needed to see the corners of his property.

"That's when he stepped back in and I grabbed his wrist The adrenaline was running in me, and he was eating snowshoe rabbits most the winter so he didn't weigh much, and out the door he came," Burns said. "Tom McDaniel grabbed his other arm. He was struggling like anybody would if you got pulled out of your house. Max Noel had his firearm, not pointed at Ted but at the ground. He said, 'Mr. Kaczynski, we're with the FBI and we have a search warrant for your house and premises. Is there anything in your house that would hurt me or my people?' Ted said 'I don't want to talk about it.' At that time I said 'Ted, you act like a gentleman and we will too.' He quit struggling and I put the handcuffs on him."

Burns heard later that Kaczynski admitted the ruse they used was the only one that would have gotten him out of the cabin.

The last Burns saw of Kaczynski was when he was taken to a nearby cabin for an interview. They knew they had the right guy almost immediately. "The search team went in, and it wasn't ten minutes and they said "Bingo, it's him. Everything is here.'"

"Everything" included meticulous journals detailing all his activities, the typewriter used to type the manifesto and even a live bomb that at one point had been rigged with a suicide ring.

Meanwhile, down at the mill, the Gehrings saw something memorable.

"It was so weird," Wendy said. "We had four agents standing over here, and it came over the radio 'We got him.' and people popped up out of the earth." Agents and SWAT team members in camouflage appeared out of the surrounding hills and she guessed they had about 300 people standing around them in no time.

Dramatic as it was, the arrest of Ted Kaczynski left Lincoln with the last poster boy in the world it wanted, and gave residents a look at the ugly side of the 24-hour news cycle.