Investigators Link Bomb Suspect To Hotel Records In Sacramento
Federal law-enforcement officials said Sunday that agents on the trail of the Unabomber had uncovered hotel records that placed Theodore John Kaczynski in Sacramento, Calif., on the same days that some of the Unabomber’s package bombs were mailed from the city.
The officials said that the hotel records provided the first supportive if slender evidence linking Kaczynski, the reclusive former math professor arrested last week, to any of the 16 explosions in the Unabomber’s almost 18-year string of attacks. Investigators have already begun building what one law-enforcement official described as an “overwhelming” circumstantial case against Kaczynski based on materials seized at his Montana cabin.
That evidence includes an aging manual typewriter on which he is believed to have written the 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto published last year. It also includes components of package bombs identical in design and construction to the Unabomber’s finely crafted explosive devices. Kaczynski was charged last week with illegal possession of explosive materials.
The officials would not say exactly when Kaczynski had visited Sacramento or where he had stayed. But Unabom investigators said the hotel records tied him to dates they had established before Kaczynski became their prime suspect. They determined when the bomber had been in Sacramento through postmarks on fragments of the bomb packages and on the envelopes of writings to news organizations.
Several bombs were mailed from Sacramento, including a device in December 1985 that killed Hugh C. Scrutton, a computer store owner. A bomb in June 1993 that injured a geneticist at his home north of San Francisco and another the same month that injured a Yale University professor were also sent from Sacramento.
In recent days, desk clerks at several inexpensive hotels near the city’s downtown bus terminal have said in interviews that they had been questioned in the last month by federal agents looking for Kaczynski. But none said they had recalled seeing him.
The hotel records are not proof that Kaczynski is the Unabomber. But they provide the first information not drawn from the Montana cabin or the bombing scenes that might connect him to the attacks. And they reinforce the authorities’ suspicions that the bomber had to have been in Sacramento at specific times to have shipped the bombs.
The effort to pick up traces of Kaczynski’s travels over the years has expanded into an exhaustive canvass of hotels, shelters for the homeless, bus stations, bookstores and libraries that he might have used on main bus routes from Lincoln, Mont., near his mountain cabin, to Salt Lake City and cities in California like Sacramento, Berkeley and San Francisco.
The authorities theorize that Kaczynski, if he is the bomber, traveled on buses, carrying his finished bombs with him and staying at low-cost, out-of-the-way lodgings to avoid detection.
xxxx