Criminal - Roll of the Dice

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

The UNABOM investigation was one of the longest manhunts in American history - it lasted for 18 years starting in 1978. Before the FBI started investigating Ted Kaczynski, they looked into a number of suspects, including a group of friends who loved playing Dungeons & Dragons. This episode is part of the podcast Project Unabom. Listen to the entire series on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/Project_Unabom. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, and members-only merch. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Hi, it's Phoebe. Today we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from our friends at the show Project Unabomb. Project Unabomb is an Apple original podcast about Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who planted bombs around the country for nearly 20 years. He died in prison in June. But the story we're bringing you today isn't about him. Before we begin, this episode contains mentions of suicide. Please use discretion.

Here's Eric Benson. It's the early summer, 1978. A college kid named Greg has just come home to Evanston, Illinois, a suburb just north of Chicago. He's a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI, in New York State, studies mechanical engineering. He's finished up his classes and come home a couple weeks early to start his summer job working for the city forestry department, trimming trees, that kind of thing. One day, in early June, he rides his bike back home from work. And I pulled up to my house, and there was nobody around.

I just started walking in, and I was approached by two men in black suits. And they said, are you Greg? I said, yes. And they said, we found your bomb. And I said, are you Greg? I said, yes. And they said, we found your bomb. And I said, what, what bomb? We bleeped Greg's name because he asked us not to use his full name. So anyway, these guys in black suits introduced themselves. They're special agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF. At first I thought I could try to help them, but then as I invited them to the house to have more discussions and they started getting pretty confrontational with me. And they'd ask things

like, you know, why'd you leave college early? Do you always take the easy way out? It's just clearly not trying to see whether or not I could have done it or not, but trying to make me angry enough that I'd disclosed something that they were looking for, some kind of information. They kept asking the same questions over and over again, too. They asked questions about an engineering professor at RPI named E.J. Smith. Greg had just finished taking his class. And I was his only student in Chicago, Illinois at the time,

and I took an incomplete in the class because it was my one final, and I wanted to get back and start earning some money at the job that I had set up in Chicago. The ATF explains that a bomb had been placed in a mailing envelope that had been discovered on May 25th between two cars in a parking lot at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. A day later, a security guard opened it, got some minor injuries. But investigators figured the parking lot wasn't its intended destination. The package had been stamped and addressed to Greg's RPI

engineering professor, E.J. Smith, in upstate New York. And as the ATF is questioning him, it's clear they're accusing Greg of trying to send it to him. Again and again, they press him on what he thinks of Professor Smith. I did tell them that he was a very poor professor, nobody in the class seemed to like the guy. He was the sort of person that at that point they had transparencies, and he would just flip one as fast as he could to get through the class, and nobody could keep up with him at all. When people asked him to slow down, he just laughed at them.

But Professor Smith wasn't the only reason the ATF was focusing on Greg. It turned out that the return address on the package was for a professor at Northwestern University named Buckley Crist. And Greg had a specific connection to him, too. Actually, his mother did. She worked in the material science department where Professor Crist was one of the three professors that she was essentially a secretary for. Do you remember? I mean, that's a crazy coincidence. What did you think?

I thought it was an amazing coincidence, yes. All these coincidences seem to add up to me being a suspect. So the ATF has found Professor E.J. Smith's only student from Chicago. And it so happens that student has just taken an incomplete in Smith's course and come home early, in time to place the bomb. And his mom works for the guy whose name is on the return address? That's either a smoking gun, or it's some wild thought experiment in probability. The Unabom investigation was one of the longest and most frustrating manhunts in the history of American law enforcement. 18 years, multiple agencies, task forces that would convene,

investigate for a few months, find nothing, and then disband. And when I first read about the long, fruitless search for the Unabomber, I kept wondering, if no one at the FBI had even heard the name Ted Kaczynski until February 1996, two months before his arrest, who were they investigating prior to that? That's what this episode is about. This is a story that's never been reported before. You won't find the people we're going to talk to mentioned in any book on the Unabomber. The most that's ever been written about them is a passing mention to a group of suspects who spent

a lot of time playing Dungeons & Dragons. But what really happened to these guys is kind of incredible. Jobs were lost, friendships were destroyed, lives were altered, as the Unabomber investigation veered off course from the very start. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials.

This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series pick completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. So in June 1978, as Greg is being interrogated by these two ATF agents at his parents' house, across town, two other ATF agents at his parents' house. Across town, two other ATF agents are talking to one of his friends, a guy Greg has known since high school named Jeff Ward. What did you, do you remember what you thought? Well, the first thing I thought

was, how on God's green earth can they think it was us? And second, yeah, I'll talk to these guys because they're going to soon find out it couldn't possibly be us and I have nothing to worry about. So I was confident that they'd talk to us, this would be it, and they'd be on to who might have really done it. And, you know, my father, he was the smart one. He said he wanted to send them away. And I said, you know, no, I'll talk to them. I have nothing to hide. But I mean, they were trying to get at, essentially, who would send a bomb

to Professor Smith addressed from Professor Crist. After a couple hours, the agents left. And Jeff picks up the phone to call Greg to tell him about this crazy thing that just happened. I think I called and didn't get through. And so I drove up to North Evanston and it was kind of like, whoa, do you know what just happened? That's what I wanted to do.

And then I walk into him being interviewed. And they're like, bonanza, let's talk to these two guys together. So Jeff and Greg are both there, these 19-year-olds, no lawyers. And Jeff, he starts mouthing off. He's a real character, and he likes to challenge authority. This is Greg again. I think at that point he was giving the agents a hard time. Of course, he had already been questioned.

They may have been part of it. You know, here I am, a smartass, sitting in on this interview where they ask the most banal and stupid questions. And that's when I probably did one of the more stupid things in my life. I got so fed up after what was turning out to be four hours of interview. I finally said to the ATF agents, look, if we wanted to kill people and we don't, there would be much better ways to do it than a matchstick bomb. And of course, that perked them up. And they asked me to explain the better ways, which I proceeded to do.

And that's probably the point at which I started to become the main target of the investigation. At first, Jeff and Greg are on high alert, especially after the agents ask Greg to take a polygraph test, and the examiner finds he has, quote, unexplained emotional reactions. But that fall, when Greg goes back to school, it seems like the whole thing is blown over. Every once in a while, he and Jeff get this weird feeling they're being watched, but nothing happens. They figure they're just being paranoid. After a while, they don't even think about it anymore.

So much so, they don't even remember it being a big deal when another bomb goes off in May 1979. This one is placed inside the Technological Institute at Northwestern, where Professor Buckley Crist and Greg's mom work. The bomb is inside a cigar box, wrapped in red polka dot wrapping paper. A graduate student opens it. The bomb causes cuts and burns and momentary blindness due to the bright flash. But that's it. It barely makes the news. Then, five months later, on November 15, 1979. The FBI says an American airline 727 with 80 persons aboard landed safely today at Washington's Dulles International Airport after a small bomb exploded in a mail pouch in the cargo hold. The flight had taken off from O'Hare in Chicago.

But like those other bombs, it doesn't do much damage. Oxygen masks deploy and the plane makes an emergency landing. But other than some smoke inhalation, the passengers and the crew escape without injuries. But a bomb on a commercial airliner? That's a major crime. That falls under the purview of the FBI. The Bureau's explosives unit examines the device,

and the way it was made seems unusual. Parts of it are hand-carved out of wood. The rest looks like it was assembled from a junkyard. The examiner said he'd looked at thousands of bombs before and never seen anything like this. So they send a photo of the device to law enforcement in Chicago and say, look familiar? Agents there say, yes.

It looks like the bomb that was placed at Northwestern and like the one found in the parking lot that was addressed to Professor E.J. Smith. Three bombs, similar construction, a pattern, and it didn't stop. June 10, 1980, seven months after the airline bomb, the president of United Airlines, a guy named Percy Wood, opens a package in his home in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. There's a book inside. It's hollowed out and stuffed with explosives.

He opens it. Percy Wood is rushed to the hospital, where fragments of the bomb are removed from his face and hands. He survives. They don't make it public, but the FBI is now certain. There's a serial bomber on the loose in Chicago. They dub the investigation Unabomb, for university and airline bombings. And now that it's a significant case, law enforcement looks back at the original suspects for the first bomb, Greg and Jeff. And it turns out there's something suspicious about them besides Greg's connection to E.J. Smith and Buckley Crist. For years, Jeff has been meeting up

with a group of Northwestern students, sometimes at the Technological Institute, where the second bomb was placed. Greg has occasionally tagged along. Jeff had started hanging out with this crew when he was still in high school. It was really cool for, you know, as a high school kid even,

that I hung out with graduate students at Northwestern, you know, because they were smart. It was fascinating to learn all the physics, all the chemistry, lasers, the whole thing. All these guys spent a lot of their time playing elaborate role-playing games. There's Dungeons and Dragons, the cliche thing nerdy guys did in the 70s and 80s.

Teenagers gathering around a kitchen table at night, basically creating a wild fantasy story together. It's like the Lord of the Rings, but with dice. And so you could be a hobbit, you could be an elf, you could be a ranger, you could be whatever, and you roamed whatever world the dungeon master created in search of fame, treasure, and fortune. You kill orcs, you get killed, and, you know, it's basically one of the best escapes on the planet. And it's not just D&D. They're really into these giant war games. There's one where they reenact Napoleon's invasion of Russia with little figurines. Another where they have big naval battles with metal ships.

Jeff and his friends even have a name for the group. We called ourselves the North Shore General Staff. North Shore, for the well-off lakeside suburbs of Chicago, where three of the first four bombs went off. It's a Tuesday night, January 20th, 1981. Earlier that day, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. Three guys from the North Shore General Staff are sitting in their third-floor walk-up apartment, a few miles from the Northwestern campus. One of them is named Dave White. He's an

extremely committed war gamer, even by the standards of that group. It's around 7 p.m., he remembers, and he and his two roommates hear a knock at the door. And I opened the door, and there's six FBI agents there. And they said something to the effect of, Mr. White, can we come in? And knowing what I know today, I probably would have said, no, please contact my attorney unless you have a search warrant. But I didn't. I was young and I said, sure, come on in. And immediately they treated us like we were guilty of something. They acted as if we were all in coordination in creating and sending bombs through the mail, which was, frankly, the first we had ever paid any attention to this. Yes, there had been news reports, and yes, there had been an event or two connected with Northwestern, but, you know, we didn't think it had anything to do with us, and we weren't really paying attention to those.

These agents are asking very specific questions that seem random to the point of absurdity. One of them asked Dave, how often do you eat Bugle's corn chips? Another friend gets asked to write out the name Enoch W. Fisher in cursive. Do any of them have a stamp collection? Who among them is meticulous? Do they act out their war games in real life?

At least one agent floats a theory. It all started out as a joke. The bombing. E.J. Smith, Buckley Crist. But now it's gone too far. This scene isn't just playing out in Dave's apartment. Other agents have fanned out across Evanston to question the other North Shore General staffers. Two agents to each suspect. Here's Jeff. They were hanging their hats on the slimmest of evidence. They thought we played with carbide cannons. We never did. You know, Greg made a mock-up of a cannon, I want to say, in a shop class. I mean, all these tall tales

were coming out. This was true. Greg says it was a little aluminum cannon that he machined in class. It stood about six inches high. They saw that as experimenting with explosives, although it had no, you know, obviously it had never been exploded, didn't have any kind of way to light a fuse to it. But they thought that was

suspicious. The agents want to know if Greg had intentionally controlled his breath on the polygraph test he took in 1978. They ask if he thought anyone might be trying to frame him. They want to know if he's willing to die for his friends. And then there's the

wood connection, which seems like it might be a real problem for Greg. They found a tree twig during one of the bombs and they felt that it might have been related to my job in the forestry department. And how is that connected to you? Because I worked, I trimmed trees in the forestry department. Got it.

Jeff's also hearing about wood, that the bombs all have some kind of symbolic connection to wood. You know, there was the bomb to Percy Wood in Lake Forest, and Greg worked for the forestry department in Evanston. Wood for, I mean, some of the stuff is so far-fetched. But when you have no one else, when you have no other possibility, you focus on what you have. And I also think we made it far too interesting for them. We all should have really just shut up. The theories simultaneously get more ridiculous and more damning. In addition to war games,

the North Shore General Staff plays in a touch football league. Some agents wonder, maybe they're using code and talking about their plans while they're on the field. Oh, God. Yeah, you know, let's, yes, it got back to me that the FBI asked a friend, and I don't know what friend, don't, please don't ask me. Well, before games, does Jeff Ward say, let's blow him away? Or, you know, let's hit him with the bomb? Long pass, which was one of our specialties. Oh, yeah. Everything became proof that we had done it. At some point, relatively quickly, we got together and part of it was just uproarious laughter that anyone could suspect us of anything like this. I mean, none of us had the skill set. Well, okay, to be fair, none of us had the skill set. Well, okay, to be fair, none of us had the skill set to do the airline bomb, you know, the earlier bombs anybody could have done.

Do you have any idea how the ATF, the FBI, just let's go, you know, law enforcement got from suspecting Greg might've had an ax to grind with EJ Smith and then could have sent the bomb to suspecting this wider group of people. Because of the Dungeons and Dragons. That's the easy answer right there. Back in 1980, you know, the 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons to some people was seen as a cult. Dungeons and Dragons has been called the most effective introduction to the occult. It is a fantasy role-playing game. The fear of Dungeons and Dragons fit in with the larger satanic panic movement happening in the U.S. at the time.

The idea that kids listening to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and playing with Ouija boards would fall under the lure of Satan and join cults. This wasn't just some fear-mongering from right-wing evangelicals. The idea went mainstream. About two months ago, a green eyeball was seen up in the sky. This eyeball was so big it blotted out in the sun, okay? These young people are playing Dungeons and Dragons. This is from a 1985 60

Minute story on D&D that looked into allegations that kids had murdered people or died by suicide after playing Dungeons and Dragons. One mother whose son took his own life describes finding out after his death that he played D&D. We went into the kitchen and there on the table were what we thought were just regular composition books with schoolwork in it. And much of the Dungeons and Dragons material along with this curse he had received in the game that day that he died. The curse that was placed on Bink's D&D character began, Your soul is mine. I choose the time. Though 60 Minutes acknowledges you can't reduce murder or suicide to just one simple cause,

a psychiatrist they interview in the story blames 28 deaths on the influence of the game. For instance, one case, the parents actually saw their child summon Dungeons & Dragons demons into his room before he killed himself. Another case, the kid thought he had the ability to astral travel, coming from the Dungeons and Dragons game, that he could leave his body and come back. FBI agents had questioned both Greg and Jeff about D&D specifically. Greg was pointedly asked if anyone had acted strangely while they were playing it.

Jeff had gotten these kind of questions too, questions that kind of set him up to rat someone out. At first, I think they thought it was me or us. But then when, you know, clearly I had no clue, it kind of turned into a little bit more of, well, who from your group could possibly have done this? And I was like, there is nobody I know that has any kind of axe to grind of this nature. And if they did, they certainly haven't told me. So Greg and Jeff, each of them knows they're not the bomber. And they also don't suspect the other one.

There's certain Greg's connection to the first bomb is just a big coincidence. The other member of the North Shore General Staff you've heard from, Dave White, he felt the same way. I sat down and talked with the FBI, and I tried to explain to them, I don't think any of these people have anything to do with this. If they did, I'd have known about it. Dave says in the first interview with the FBI, they ran through every member of the North Shore General Staff. And they kept trying to push me. It's like, are you sure?

Could it be this person? Could it be that person? I'm like, no, it's not him. You know, I know him. I know him really well. No, they're not those kind of people. And they came back to me. Well, what about Jeff?

I said, well, I don't really know Jeff that well. But I didn't think he was capable of doing this from what the FBI was telling me. The Unabomber was very meticulous, very focused in his work, and Jeff was just not focused that way. If it sounds like Dave is talking shit about Jeff, it's because he is. They were roommates for a couple years, and they didn't really get along. Jeff claims it was because he was the better athlete. Anyway, Dave tells the FBI Jeff couldn't be the Unabomber because of his lack of focus. It would come up during their war games, while Dave would take hours to intricately paint the pewter figurines that made up his army. Jeff would not. We actually had some problems where

when Jeff would field an army, he'd buy the cheapest miniatures you could get, usually plastic, and he'd paint them one color. It's just like all red or all yellow. And we kind of had to say, Jeff, you know, come on, get with the program. You know, if you're going to put miniatures out here, put a little effort into it. So it couldn't be Jeff. Or could it? Dave started to wonder, why would the FBI specifically mention Jeff? Why were they leaning so hard on him? Because that seed of doubt was in my head,

I began to feel more and more like, maybe it is Jeff. Jeff's younger brothers are being questioned by the FBI too. That seemed suspicious. The other thing that really troubled me, I realized, was that Jeff's father had a basement workshop where he made everything for remote-controlled planes and cars. And that was troubling, too, because there's the ability to make anything you need, including a bomb, other than the chemicals. You know, you could make switches, you could make triggers, you could make wiring, you could make, you know, the box itself and the hinges if you wanted to. Nobody else in our group that I knew of had access to that kind of layout. You know, none of these things ever seemed to make any sense until I decided I needed to do some snooping of my own. And as Jeff was my roommate at the time for a short while, I went through his desk.

And I found in one of his drawers the handwritten lyrics to a song by John Prine called Sweet Revenge. And that shook me up. I got kicked off of Noah's Ark. And that shook me up. Sweet Revenge is a song that John Prine released in 1973. The fact that the song was about someone getting revenge and that Jeff had taken the time to write out the lyrics, Dave thought there had to be something to it. So he started analyzing the lyrics.

He mentions in one line, I caught an aisle seat on a plane. And one of the bombs went off on a plane. He says he drove an English teacher half insane. One of the bombs was originally addressed to an English teacher. And he mentions red balloons. And one of the bombs had red balloon wrapping paper. That's not a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence. It's not a coincidence. It's wrong. E.J. Smith, the intended recipient of the first bomb, was an engineering professor, not an English professor. And the second bomb was wrapped in red polka dot wrapping paper, not red balloon wrapping paper. But never mind. And there's even a line in there that says the white meat is on the run. The white meat, on the run. The white meat, as in Dave White.

So I think maybe he might have personally taken that to use against me. That was enough. Dave thought the FBI needed to know about these lyrics. I made a copy of it. And I took it to the FBI and said, there's your guy. He's telling you how he's making his bombs. He's telling you how he's picking them.

They were like, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it. And then it went nowhere. Sweeter events, sweeter events Will prevail without fail So obviously Jeff Ward was not the Unabomber. But I want to be fair to Dave. A lot of the sleuthing in the Unabomb case, not just by amateur sleuths like Dave White, but by the professionals,

involved chasing down hunches and tiny scraps of information, no matter how absurd. A few months after the FBI questioned Greg, Jeff, and Dave, they all got subpoenas in the mail. A grand jury had been convened. They were being asked to testify. Greg and Jeff both had lawyers by that point, and their lawyers tell them,

plead the fifth. Dave, however, is eager to testify. He doesn't have a lawyer. He wants to tell the grand jury all about Jeff and sweet revenge and everything else. Greg says he heard about Dave's suspicions. I did. I heard about, you mentioned Dave White. I heard that he was saying that he thought that we could have done it, that Jeff and I could have done it. And how did that make you feel? Very surprised. Pretty angry.

Well, at that point, I really wasn't talking to him all that much. I thought he was always pretty strange. But he had come up with that, and I thought actually it might be helping me because for somebody to really believe that we could have done it but to have no supporting evidence or anything to show that we had done it, you know, clearly he was the guy they broke, and they still can't say anything that would help their case.

But when Dave actually went in front of the grand jury to testify, the prosecutor didn't want to hear anything about his theories. So Dave's feeling stymied, and he decides to take it upon himself to stop the would-be Unabomber. He goes to talk to Jeff's father to convince him of the truth. Jeff was there at his parents' house when it happened. Dave White rings the front doorbell, and I think my father opened the front doorbell. And I think my father

opened the front door. And Dave says, you know, hey, Mr. Ward, I'm here. You know, I really think Jeff has done this. And if you let me talk to you for 20 minutes, I could convince you. And my father told him to get his fucking ass off the front porch, because first he'd kick it, and then he'd call the police. So that was the last time I ever saw Dave White. For the record, Dave doesn't remember this happening, but he also said it's possible that it did. But then an even stranger thing happens, the kind of thing that maybe only happens when for years you've got federal agents hounding you, showing you pictures to intimidate you, and prove they've been following you. Jeff starts to

think, maybe the bombs are somehow connected to the North Shore General Staff. An FBI agent convinces Jeff to go into the Chicago office to take a polygraph test. Right before they administer it, they show him a picture of a typewritten letter the bomber sent. Jeff thinks it's probably the letter Percy Wood received. It freaks Jeff out. I had a really old Royal typewriter back in those days, Eric. And it had a very distinctive font that you don't see in many things, particularly the four. So all of a sudden I look and that looks like my typewriter. That sounds like you thought that they were kind of onto something. Before then, no, absolutely not. It was absurd. But when I saw my typewriter or the font for my typewriter, it made me believe there was some other possibility.

It wasn't like I went, whoa, maybe one of these guys tried to frame me. It was like, whoa, maybe someone tangential to the group managed to pull this off. Maybe. And part of it is, you know, after you hear this so often, you start to be convinced it's a possibility that it was somebody attached to us. So now Dave thinks Jeff did it. Jeff thinks maybe someone else tied to the group did it. This boogeyman, whoever he is, is turning out to be the biggest monster these D&D players have ever faced. We'll be right back. Are you looking to eat healthier but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories?

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But the FBI investigation had taken a toll on the group. By 1982, a year after the FBI first questioned all of them, the North Shore General staff had fizzled out. The pressure was too much. They stopped talking. It's hard to want to fake kill each other in a game when you're worried that one of you might be an actual killer. And then Greg decides he needs a change. The investigation had been messing with his life too much. He'd gotten a job after college working for a company that mostly did work maintaining nuclear power plants. But the whole time he worked there, he had the suspicion that something was off.

He was never given a security clearance to work at a nuclear plant. Instead, they gave him backwater assignments in the coal industry. So after nine months, around the time the FBI stepped up the pressure, he left the company. When I quit my boss's boss, I went and talked to him and he told me that that was happening, that they were informed that I wasn't cooperating with investigation. I couldn't get a security clearance. And the other thing is, everything that they found on these bombs was tied to me. I mean, these addresses or these trade twigs, and I felt, okay, if I get out of Chicago, all these bombs at that point were happening in Chicago.

If I got out of there, then they'd realize that it wasn't me. So in the spring of 1983, Greg left Chicago and resettled in another city in the Midwest. He says he's still scarred by his interactions with law enforcement, by being tarnished as a terrorism

suspect. That's why we're only using his first name, and why I didn't just tell you which city he settled in. That's why I won't tell you the name of the company where he's now a senior executive. Those were Greg's conditions for talking to us. He doesn't want this following him anymore.

Unlike Greg, Jeff had stuck around in Chicago. After the Percy Wood bomb, there were two more bombs sent in 1982, then four bombs in 1985. None of them go off in Chicago. The last of those was placed in the parking lot of a computer store in 1985. None of them go off in Chicago. The last of those was placed in the parking lot of a computer store in Sacramento. It killed the owner, Hugh Scrutton. The Unabomber's first fatality. After that, the FBI finally reveals publicly that the 11 bombings are connected. Were you following the bombings? Did you have any way to follow the bombings? Oh, you better believe it.

And not only that, but we're feeling, you know, we weren't jerks. We were like, God, if we can uncover who this person is, let's help. But we also were fighting this, how the fuck can you believe it was us? Jeff had antagonized federal law enforcement from the start. He wrote a song set to Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall. It went, we don't need no investigation. We would never bomb a soul. There's no need for interrogation. And then he calls the FBI agent working the case at the time, a, quote, fucking asshole. By the mid-80s, Jeff was actually saying that to the FBI. And then I'd call up the FBI, they'd take my call, and I'd ream the agents out.

You weren't supposed to disrespect the FBI, and they lined up for me to disrespect them. You know, given that we were reasonably intelligent people, we weren't going to take crap. You weren't going to walk all over us, you know. If you want to work together, we'll work together. If you don't, fuck off. I don't know if you can imagine what it's like to face the full weight of the federal government with absolutely no possibility of proving yourself innocent and having it affect you on a day-to-day basis. And you don't know when they're going to strike next. I mean, when I was first going out

with my wife and I met her parents, I had to say, oh, and by the way, if you get a subsequent call from the FBI, here's why. You know, you had to tell certain people certain things so that the FBI couldn't beat you to it. This continued for years. One reason that Jeff was constantly being hounded by the FBI is because the Unabom case was constantly changing hands. Whenever someone new started on the case, they'd go back to the beginning of the case file to see if there was some clue everyone else had missed. And there were Greg and Jeff. As the bombings moved well beyond Chicago, and as the devices got more complex, it seemed less and less likely it was them. But no agent was willing to slam the door shut. Greg pointed out to me that even after the Unabombed suspect was identified by an eyewitness

as being 5 feet 10 inches tall, a full 6 inches shorter than Greg, he remained a suspect. In 1991, a new agent in Chicago took over the case, a guy named John Larson. He opened up the case file and went back to the beginning. And there were all these D&D players. He figured he should probably question them. Larson was working with another agent, Joe Dorley, who picked up the phone and called Jeff. And he goes, Jeff, I know you're going to hang,

please don't hang up on me. I know you don't want to talk to me. I know what you've been through. All I want to do is clear you. That's all I want to do. We know it's not you. Will you talk to me. I know what you've been through. All I want to do is clear you. That's all I want to do. We know it's not you. Will you talk to me? So I said, yeah, I'll talk to you. Can I bring John Larson? Yep, you can bring John Larson. So Joe and John sit down with Jeff Ward, and John immediately sees for himself why Jeff has been in the crosshairs for so long. He can be difficult.

Actually, he can be kind of a dick. He has kind of a warped aggressiveness. This is John Larson. Jeff would probably describe himself as a manic, high-intensity brain. Pretty quickly, though, Jeff warms up to John. He didn't treat Jeff like all the other agents who'd questioned him over the years. They approached us like we should have been approached from day one. They admitted that mistakes were made. They were open with me

about what happened, showed me pictures of the bombs. You know, for the first time, I got the entire picture of the Unabomb investigation. But, you know, to have these two agents come to treat me like a human being and to sit down and talk to me about this whole time I got the entire picture of the Unabomb investigation. But, you know, to have these two agents come to treat me like a human being and to sit down and talk to me about this whole thing was incredibly different. And the more John and Joe talk with him, the more he begins to feel like a partner, not a suspect. So after years of straight animosity toward the FBI, Jeff now deputizes himself as a fixer for John Larson. It becomes kind of a focus of his life, revisiting the past to see if there's some clue that got overlooked, racking his brain to remember if some random suspicious guy passed

through their group for a few war games way back when. And he agrees to introduce John to the original suspect in the case. And so you reached out to Greg, and Greg did talk to them? He did. He didn't want to. And he was a little pissed at me for doing it. But I said, look, these guys are different. They want to clear us. If we want to get out from under this, Joe Dorley and John Larson are our best shot. Or so Jeff thought.

But when John Larson went to see Greg, what he said to him was, we know you're not the Unabomber. We think Jeff Ward might be. I think they thought he was trying to, Jeff was trying to frame me, basically. And they asked, I let him go through it and they asked me,

do you think that Jeff could have done it? I think my answer was, no, absolutely not. He couldn't have done it. I mean, I see what you're saying. I see what you're getting at. I see why you think that he could have done it. But knowing him as much as I did, I know that there's no way he could have done it. I mean, I've seen Jeff try to fix the battery with an ax.

He's not going to be building bombs and that kind of thing. When I asked John Larson about this, he said, look, there was a lot of compelling evidence around Jeff. We had to check it out. But the more John looked into Jeff, the more he genuinely became interested in clearing him. Not just for Jeff's sake. It would allow John to cross a name off the list for good.

John started putting together a more precise timeline, trying to figure out where Greg and Jeff and Dave White and a few others were when the 12 bombs had been placed or sent in the mail. But it was 1992 now. The Unabomber hadn't struck in five years. John knew there was really only one way to figure this out for sure. I didn't want anybody to get hurt or killed, but I needed another device to really clear these people out. If a bomb went off and John could prove

that none of the D&D guys were at the place it had been sent from, then he could pretty much close the case on them. On June 22, 1993, a genetic scientist named Charles Epstein opened a package at his home in Tiburon, California, high up on a ridge overlooking San Francisco Bay. It exploded in his hands, causing significant damage, but not killing him. Two days later, a Yale computer science professor named David Gelernter

opened a similar package at his office in New Haven. He too was nearly killed, but survived. Both bombs had been mailed from Sacramento. John Larson began tracking down the former members of the North Shore General Staff. We found every one of these young guys. There was like eight of them. And we talked to them, got where they were. And then we went out and talked to every individual they told us. And through

verification, we eliminated the whole group. Before Kaczynski, did you ever think you had the guy? No, no. I pulled the list out. I have it in my hand here. And my last entry into it is in February 15th, 1996. And Kaczynski was Chicago's sub-K case 653. So up to that point, we had cleared 652 people. Do you know what number Jeff was? Yeah, I can give you that. The Dungeons and Dragons people, they were sub K 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. On April 3rd, 1996, John Larson called Jeff Ward to say the FBI had done it. They'd captured the Unabomber. The nightmare was over.

Basically, he called me up and said, yeah, we got him. I said, I'll describe him. John described Ted Kaczynski. Recluse, Montana, anti-technology guy. I go, eh, wrong guy. Nope, this cannot possibly be the guy. And I told both John and Joe,

eh, you got the wrong guy. We're going to go right back to square one. You know, after putting so much sweat and effort into trying to solve this case, perhaps it was that I could not at that point admit to myself that Ted never came through our group. That as I originally believed, the connection to Greg was totally coincidental. And we went through all of this for nothing. So I think I wanted to give it some meaning that it had to be somebody from the group

when clearly it wasn't. You know, it took me, it certainly took me a while to process this not being a part of my life. Jeff wasn't the only one in the North Shore General Staff who had a hard time accepting that Ted Kaczynski was the right guy. I didn't see how he had any connection with Evanston or Northwestern or our group. This is Dave White again. Remember, he was convinced that Jeff Ward was the bomber.

What with his sloppy war game figurines and John Prine lyrics. Dave White believes that to this day. Sometime after Ted Kaczynski was caught, Dave got a phone call. It was Jeff on the line. And I was a little troubled, a little worried. And he specifically said, do you still think I'm the Unabomber? And I said, doesn't matter what I think, you know you are. I said, you know you're connected.

It bothered me that he was tracking me down. I had to tell my wife and my kids, you are no longer allowed to touch any packages or boxes that may come in the mail or get left outside the house. If you see them, you tell me you do not touch them. For all their work in Chicago, neither John Larson or Jeff Ward could ultimately claim any responsibility for apprehending Ted Kaczynski. The keys to the Unabombe case lay with only one person, a guy who had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons. As the FBI's fruitless search dragged on, he was living alone in the middle of the desert, far, far away. I ended up kind of digging a hole in the ground, covering it with some pieces of tin that I had found and living underground for the first couple of years that I was here. More about that on the show Project Unabom, which you can listen to right now on Apple Podcasts. Project Unabom is an Apple Original podcast produced by Pineapple Street Studios.

It was produced by senior producer Jonathan Menjivar and Eric Benson, along with Elliot Adler and Melissa Slaughter. Editing by Joel Lovell and Maddie Sprung-Kaiser. Thank you. Video recording by Brian Standover at the Texas Monthly Studio. Music by Mark Orton and John Hancock. Additional music by Eric Phillips and Jeff Baxter. Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky are the executive producers of Pineapple Street. Criminal is recorded at North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows

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