CHAPTER 1
On the afternoon of April 24, 1995, a sunny Monday, a strange package arrived at the California Forestry Association’s headquarters in Sacramento. It was the size of a shoebox, wrapped in plain brown paper, and heavy. Workers gathered around the parcel, which sat on a desk, and looked it over. A scientist who worked in the office lifted the box, gave it a shake.
“It’s heavy enough to be a bomb,” he joked.
Gilbert Murray, the association’s president, chuckled along with his co-worker. Murray was a handsome, balding man with a boyish smile. Friends called him Gil. His organization promoted the timber industry, which cut down trees to build things like houses and furniture. Many environmentalists cursed loggers for cutting down too many trees, sometimes turning forestland into stumps. But Murray could scarcely imagine any of them being so angry that they would mail a bomb to his office. Still, when a pregnant co-worker began to cut into the paper with scissors, Murray stopped her.
“Let me do that for you,” he said.
Murray carried the package to his office and placed it on the desk. It was addressed to William Dennison, the association’s former president. Murray figured the contents of the parcel were intended for his organization, not Dennison, who had retired a year earlier. He stood hunched over the package and began to cut through the strong tape. His work revealed a wooden box, which he began to open.
It would be the last thing he ever saw.
A deafening explosion shook the office, a blast so powerful it shattered windows and shot pieces of furniture sixty feet across the office. Two doors in the office hurtled off their hinges. The noise sent workers racing out of the building. They gathered outside, ears still ringing, as black smoke poured from the one-story brick building. They smelled chemicals. Murray’s panicked co-workers knew he was still in the building.
“Gil!” one woman shrieked. “Gil!”
No response.
By lifting the box’s lid, Murray had triggered a bomb tucked neatly inside.
* * *
Dick Ross, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Sacramento office, raced to the California Forestry Association and stalked into Murray’s office before police could close down the crime scene with yellow tape. Ross’s eyes roved from Murray’s corpse, which lay on the floor, to fragments of bomb parts and pooled and splattered blood. He was looking for clues. Ross saw in the wreckage the work of a mysterious bomber who had terrorized America for nearly seventeen years.
The culprit had now mailed or secretly hand delivered sixteen bombs from 1978 until that spring day in 1995. Fourteen had exploded, leaving three people dead and twenty-three injured. Most of the bomber’s targets had connections to universities or airlines. The FBI code-named its case UNABOM, short for UNiversity, Airline, BOMbing. Agents on the UNABOM Task Force, along with news reporters and the public, called the mysterious killer the “Unabomber.”
Ross was shaken by the scene inside the California Forestry Association building, just ten blocks from his own office. Yet he was all business when he phoned the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office. He reached Terry D. Turchie, who supervised the team.
“Terry,” he said. “We’ve had a bombing up here. Everything about it looks like UNABOM. I’ve closed down the scene.”
The first agent out the door was Pat Webb, a bomb expert. He hopped into the driver’s seat of his brand-new FBI car, flipped on its flashing emergency lights, and gunned the engine. Webb reached Sacramento, more than eighty miles northeast of his San Francisco office, in record time. At 5:30 that evening, he entered the crime scene, where Gil Murray’s body remained on the floor. Webb observed brown paper glued to pieces of the wooden box, batteries stripped of wrappers and covered in tape, and other familiar bomb parts. All were Unabomber trademarks.
Webb walked outside and took a seat on the curb. He phoned Turchie in San Francisco and delivered the cold facts: “Terry, this is a UNABOM event.” But it was more than that. The Unabomber’s newest explosive was more powerful than any of his previous bombs.
* * *
The UNABOM Task Force spent days bagging and tagging bomb parts and other evidence. Agents shipped them to the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. They hoped the bureau’s forensic analysts could find a fiber or a fingerprint—anything they could link to the bomber.
Agents also hoped the killer would claim responsibility for the latest crime. He had grown bolder in his recent attacks, mailing letters to newspapers in which he bragged about his bombings and taunted the FBI. He identified himself as a terrorist group called “FC.”
On the very day Murray died, The New York Times received a long, typewritten letter. “The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut,” the Unabomber wrote. “We won’t waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts.… Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn’t appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke.”
Text copyright © 2019 by Bryan Denson
