Reporters and Revelations

LINCOLN - For a couple long weeks in April 1996, Lincoln was the epicenter of the biggest news story in America.

The FBI arrested Theodore J. Kaczynski here April 3 in connection with the Unabomber bombings that had targeted universities and airlines for 18 years and reporters from around the country flocked to Lincoln.

For two weeks, until Kaczynski was transferred from Helena to California, they camped out in Lincoln or called anyone they could, trying to dredge up any nugget they could on his life here. In the process, they didn't always paint Lincoln, or themselves, in a positive light.

For most Lincoln residents, the experience ranged from simply irritating to downright absurd.

Susie Gehring, who lived only about a mile from Kaczynski, came home from Helena to find about 20 messages on her machine from news agencies all over the country. To her Ted was just a local weirdo she could feel watching her as she looked for her stray cattle near his property. She never called them back, but remembers the parade of satellite trucks and media vehicle on Stemple Pass Road any time there was a new development. "When I was riding out in the field, you knew, 'cause here's all the rigs going up Stemple, then they all come back down and wait in town."

All they got from her was a wave.

They got a bit more from Krissi Hagen, but maybe not what they expected.

"Chaos and idiots," is how she described the hoopla she dealt with while working at Mom's Drive Inn.

The reporters in town asked a hundred questions but would leave her alone if she was too busy.

"It was the phone calls where the idiots came in. I remember...getting phone calls and people asking if we had indoor plumbing." she said. "It was all people from back east who have no clue and seriously didn't know if we had running water. I'm thinking 'you're talking to me on a telephone. people. How stupid are you?'"

Locals recall running a gauntlet of reporters just to get into the post office and Lincoln Librarian Sherri Wood said they kept hitting up people coming to the library, which was one of the few places Kaczynski spent any time in town.

Wood noticed a difference between Montana journalists, who kept a lower profile and were more respectful, and the out-of-state media. "You could tell the out of state (reporters) because the arrogance was just dripping off of them," she said. " I think a majority of them were so arrogant and (thought) they were doing this little hick-y town a favor."

One media outlet even represented Lincoln with an image of bearded men who looked like 19th Century hillbilly stereotypes.

Wendy Gerhing and her late husband Butch owned the sawmill just a few hundred yards away from Kaczynskis' property that served as the FBI's staging area. They witnessed most of their operation. Though they were a hot commodity for reporters, they mostly avoided the media.

"We decided to do the interview with the Today Show, just to get them off our back so to speak," Wendy, who was pregnant with twins at the time, said. They felt it was also a chance to show that people in Lincoln weren't just a bunch of hillbillies.

The following day, after a judge called off a press tour out of concern for the case, Wendy saw a once friendly reporter turned hostile, which she thinks demonstrated what some in the media were capable of. "It was just a breaking point, that these people were so ...backstabbing and just cutthroat," she said.

Wood was one of the only people in town Kaczynski was actually friendly with and may have felt the bite of the media more than anyone as she heard what was said about a person she then still considered a friend. A couple days after his arrest she spoke with reporters. They expected dirt but were surprised she had nice things to say about him. "How could I not, if that's the only thing I knew about him at that point?" she asked.

Some in town sought the media spotlight, granting interviews and spinning tales of having coffee with Kaczynski or hanging out with him in bars. "I think some people were enamored and wanted to be on TV, the people who wanted to be left alone didn't necessarily get to be left alone and some people wanted to really be much more a part of the story than they ever really had been," Wood said.

Wood and her son Danny, who got along well with Kaczynski, saw him before they moved him to California. She told him "Honest to God, Ted, you must have had quite the social life. I don't know how you kept up with it."

By most accounts, the "old hermit" scorned conversation and was about the farthest thing from a barfly.

Like the sporadic efforts to cash in on the notoriety by selling t-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, it divided the community in some way for a couple years, but that passed. "People who were having problems with each other, you'd never know it today," Wood said.

One media outlet that didn't get into the act was the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch. Enie Fisher, who was publisher and editor at the time, said she felt the story was so well covered by everyone else, there wasn't much to add.

In the weeks that followed they did run stories from outside news sources, and provided a unique glimpse into what Lincoln fifth and sixth graders felt by running letters they had written. Jenny Sutton, who was in sixth grade, in many ways summed up a prevailing opinion in town when she wrote "the people of Lincoln are being bothered. The media is up here all the time. I don't know why they just can't get it over with. Half the town didn't even know the guy. I wish someday Lincoln would be back to the same way it was before this happened."

In time, the story moved on, and so did the reporters. "Once they moved Ted to California the horde of zombie reporters took off and moved down there," Wood said.

But that wasn't the end of the story for Lincoln.

In 1998 Kaczynski acknowledged he was the Unabomber who had injured 23 people and killed three with sixteen home made bombs. He pleaded guilty in an agreement that spared him the death penalty and the ignominy he saw in the insanity defense his lawyers likely would have used.

Kaczynski's cabin -really more of a shed by any reasonable standard - yielded a veritable mountain of evidence, from detailed journals to the infamous gray hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses to a completed bomb made in his unique, meticulous style.

Jerry Burns, the retired Forest Service law enforcement officer who played a pivotal role in Kaczynski's apprehension, regrets not seeing him go to trial. He had received copies and transcripts of many of Kaczynski's journals to help with local investigations. Through them, he saw the person he believes Kaczynski really was - a man both cruel and cowardly who tortured mice that ate his gloves, who lamented that his early bombs didn't take lives and who found satisfaction in finally killing someone.

"Of course he copped a plea deal in the end there, but in my opinion it would have been a little nice for him to go to trial because it would have been nice for people to know what a very cowardly criminal he was," Burns said.

Kaczynski continued to write to Wood and Dick and Eileen Lundberg, who owned the Lincoln Stage and sometimes gave him rides to Helena. Knowing the details of his activities would be made public, he wrote them so they could hear everything from him first. "When he started listing a lot of the crimes he did here, I think my mouth just dropped," Wood said. "Never in a million years would we have guessed he was behind some of the stuff going on around here."

With so many loggers, miners and ranchers in the area, she figures he must have hated everybody in Lincoln.

"Ted was pretty active around the area for different crimes that we never knew about until we started reading his diaries," Burns said. "From breaking into houses to putting trip wires on trails to shooting cattle to shooting at airplanes and helicopters. There was some logging equipment up in Willow Creek ... that was burned, he was responsible for that too."

They found he was also responsible for an arson that destroyed an area cabin and for sabotaging the Gehring's sawmill.

The revelations also put other unexplained events into perspective.

Wendy recalled her stepdaughter Jamie, who was just a child at the time, would sleep with her window open and always said she heard someone walking up their driveway. They thought she was imagining things, but after Kaczynski's arrest they realized she probably heard him making his way to some junked cars near the house to strip wiring and electronics to use as bomb components. Before he was christened the Unabomber, Kaczynski was referred to as the Junkyard bomber, due to the scavenged components he used in his devices.

These days, its not unusual to hear someone passing through mention the Unabomber or ask where his cabin was, but his arrest, which coincided with the 81-day Freemen standoff near Jordan, probably had more of an impact on Montana's image as a hiding place for kooks and anti-government types than on Lincoln in particular.

Here, the curious provided a boost in tourism, but it never defined the town other than becoming a handy way for Lincoln residents to remind folks from outside the state where the town was.

In reality, other forces, which rarely drew national media attention, had a far larger impact.

After Montana voters banned cyanide heap-leach mining in 1998, plans for a major gold mine fell through. The population growth that came with the mining plans ground to a halt and began to tumble.

The loss of the 7-Up Ranch Supper Club in 2001 also took a toll. Peg and Red Eschenbacher, who move to Lincoln in 1995, said that's really when they saw Lincoln change. The club was a significant day-trip destination for folks in Great Falls and as the home to the Blackfoot Valley Art Auction and the original starting point for Race to the Sky, they felt it was a hub for the area. They believe its loss had far more impact than Kaczynski.

Twenty years later Lincoln still hasn't really figured out how Kaczynski fits into its narrative.

"You'd probably get two sides of that," said former School principal and superintendent Kathy Heisler, "You'd probably get one side that says 'yeah, it's an important part of Lincoln's history,' and you'd probably get the other side that doesn't want the town remembered for that."

"You hate to think it would define us in any way, but if you think about it, it would be kind of a denial, too. Even now people come in and say 'where did Ted live?' I don't think it will ever go away," said Teresa Garland, who talked gardening with Kaczynski when she ran Garlands Town and Country. "There are just people who like that kind of a story. There are people . . .that's interesting to them. I'm sure there are people who only know Lincoln because they know the Rodeo. There are probably only people who only know Lincoln because of Lambkins or Garlands."

These days, Lincoln is getting to be known for different reasons. "It is so nice to have tourists come in here and ask me about Sculpture in the Wild and the grizzly bear. I hardly ever hear anybody come in and ask about Ted Kaczynski and I love it. I love us being known for ... the new things being done and tried," said Wood, who reconciled the Ted she knew with the criminal she never wants to see freed. "I'm just really pleased with how Lincoln has moved above and beyond."

Still, there's no denying Ted Kaczynski is a part of Lincoln's' history. There's also no denying most people here are happy to leave him there.