With a green light from headquarters to continue the investigation, Webb and members of his squad began brainstorming new avenues of inquiry and revisiting old case files looking for clues they may have missed. Six and a half years had passed since the Salt Lake City bombing outside Gary Wright’s computer store, and while some at the bureau remained convinced they’d heard the last of the Unabomber, Webb and his case agent, John Conway, were confident he’d resurface, eventually, and they were determined to make headway.
The squad’s reinvigorated efforts had them implementing tried-and-true investigative techniques that had proved successful in prior bombing investigations. One, the “dog walker,” had agents surveilling locations the Unabomber may have visited while in the Bay Area. They knew he had mailed one of his packages from a public mailbox in Sacramento and that he had scouted a neighborhood of Oakland to conjure up a plausible return address for the “Weinberg Tool and Supply Company” to use on the Boeing package. He had also visited Cory Hall at the UC Berkeley campus at least two times to deliver his homemade bombs. Agents were to visit these locations, performing tasks such as walking a dog, watching for any suspicious activity, and questioning regulars during the times the Unabomber may have been there on the off chance someone remembered seeing a person who had looked out of place—someone who hadn’t appeared to belong.
Just six months after the major case conference at the Holiday Inn, Webb got word of the bombing at the home of geneticist Charles Epstein. His ability to recall even the small details surrounding that event after nearly three decades was noteworthy. He was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge en route to his home in Marin County, having just picked up his wife at the airport, when his portable phone rang. Back then, commercial cell phones were still a novelty and had only been made available to the public two years earlier. Although they were technically considered hand-held devices, they were bulky, cumbersome, and heavy, weighing close to two pounds and by no means portable. Webb recalled it was one of those big old handset phones—a box phone. “It was like five watts; you could call Mars with the damn thing!” Most were installed as car phones, being too big to fit into a jacket pocket, and they operated on a 3G network, which meant spotty service and lots of dropped calls. Webb found a safe place to pull over to take the call.
It was Denise Monde, his colleague in the San Francisco field office. “There’s been a bombing in Tiburon,” she told him. “I think you should go.”
Webb hadn’t seen his wife in weeks, and this was one of the rare occasions he’d actually been free to pick her up after a trip east to visit family. Still, being the wife of an FBI agent, Florence was accustomed to spur-of-the-moment changes. She knew time was of the essence and arranged for her elder daughter, Sarah, to fetch her at the Safeway in nearby Mill Valley so her husband could be on his way.
Tiburon is an incorporated town on the southwest corner of the Tiburon Peninsula that can be reached by ferry from San Francisco. The wealthy enclave is isolated from the rest of the Bay Area, with a quaint downtown district and just two roads in and out of the community. Webb was about fifteen minutes away on Highway 101 when he got the call that afternoon; he knew he was getting close when he saw an ambulance with flashing lights pass him in the opposite lane, no doubt carrying the victim to the hospital. A sergeant from the Mill Valley Police Department looking absolutely baffled was posted outside the residence when Webb pulled up to the scene that afternoon. The sergeant had never been to a bombing crime scene, and he’d never seen anything like what had just confronted him inside the residence. His superior had advised him to wait for the FBI, and he looked relieved when he saw Webb step out of his car. All he knew was that the victim had been taken away in an ambulance and that the man’s dining room was all torn up as a result of the explosion. This would be the Unabomber’s thirteenth attack, and the third one attended by Webb.
Webb’s arrival on the scene coincided with that of the chief of the Mill Valley Police Department. “We’ll handle it from here,” Webb advised him.
Before entering the residence, Webb made sure to alert ATF and the Postal Inspection Service, then joined members of his team in the kitchen where the bomb had detonated. The room had expansive windows boasting a view of the San Francisco Bay and the army barracks across the way.
A review of the evidence determined that Dr. Epstein had been sitting at the kitchen table when the device detonated. Alone and gravely injured, he tried to call for help. But he was unable to dial the telephone because his fingers had been ripped from his hand in the explosion. As a result, he would never play the cello again.
Over the next several hours, more than a dozen agents flooded the area, with some going through the house in search of evidence and others talking to neighbors who might have witnessed something. Bomb tech Don Sachtleben was dispatched to the hospital to interview Dr. Epstein and called Webb at the crime scene to report his findings. According to Sachtleben, the only thing the victim remembered was zipping open the padded envelope before it exploded. Webb’s initial examination of the components at the scene had him uneasy. There was something about the device’s construction that bothered him; it was certainly unconventional in the way it was built, incorporating batteries and a spring trigger. It had arrived in a Jiffy envelope no bigger than a VHS tape, which meant it had been small in nature, and had a return address listed as “James Hill, Chemistry Department, California State University, Sacramento, California.” Agents located Professor Hill, who, like the others, had no knowledge of the package.
“Let’s go to the office tomorrow morning and lay it all out,” Webb told his squad members. He didn’t want to jump to an early conclusion, but his gut was telling him that the Unabomber was back.
During the car ride home, Webb called the office and asked Alexandria Jacobson, an analyst on the squad, to pull the UNABOM slide set, which contained photographs of all of his previous devices. He wanted to compare them to the components the team had collected from the Epstein bombing scene to see if they matched.
The following morning, Webb and about a dozen others from the San Francisco Division spent several hours poring over the slide set, examining the various components: the springs, the batteries, the metal end plugs, the insulated wire, the improvised flip switch, the handmade wooden boxes.
“Hey, the end piece on that pipe is identical to the Epstein device,” one person remarked.
By noontime, everyone agreed: the Unabomber was out of hiding. Webb got on the phone to headquarters to alert the guys in the explosives unit and before long, everyone at headquarters knew.
The next morning, Webb was driving along the marina on his way to the office when he got a call from someone at headquarters. “Pull over!” the supervisor instructed. “Are you parked safely?”
“Yeah, what’s going on?” Webb quizzed.
“There’s been a bombing at Yale University. We think it’s UNABOM.”
Webb learned that the victim was a computer science professor named David Gelernter, and he had been critically injured in the explosion. Apparently Gelernter had been away in Israel. Upon his return to campus, he found the envelope on his desk, which was located in a fifth-floor office of Arthur K. Watson Hall in the university’s Computer Science Department. According to FBI agents on the scene, the mailing label and padded envelope appeared identical to the one received by Dr. Epstein, right down to the typewritten mailing label. It was postmarked from Sacramento, California, indicating it had gone through the US mail system.
The enclosed IED utilized a passive booby-trap designed to explode if handled by someone—in this case Dr. Gelernter, who lost several fingers in the ensuing explosion. After the bomb went off, he managed to stagger down five flights of stairs and get himself to a nearby hospital where he received treatment. His right hand and eye were permanently damaged.
A forensic examination of the two devices indicated the Unabomber had used his time in hiding to further perfect his bomb-making skills. His latest devices were smaller than his previous bombs and had been meticulously constructed to withstand being tossed around without the risk of detonating. This meant he could easily send his devices through the US mail system, ensuring that he didn’t have to make any deliveries and risk exposing himself as he’d done in the computer store case.
Within hours of the Gelernter attack, a man called the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in nearby West Haven and told the switchboard operator, “You’re next.” Authorities were unsure if the call was related to the Yale attack and commenced an investigation.
That same afternoon, Warren Hoge, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times, received a typewritten letter, postmarked June 21, 1993, from Sacramento, California, that was purportedly from an anarchist group calling itself “FC,” or Freedom Club—the very same initials lab examiners had found scratched into many of the Unabomber’s devices.
“We are an anarchist group calling ourselves FC,” the letter began. “Notice that the postmark on this envelope precedes a newsworthy event that will happen about the time you receive this letter, if [crossed out] nothing goes wrong. This will prove that we knew about the event in advance, so our claim of responsibility is truthful.”
The author claimed the purpose of the written communication was twofold—to establish the group’s identity and to supply the newspaper with an identifying number, a secret code, if you will, provided in the format of a social security number, that it would use in all future correspondence to ensure that others could not take credit for attacks carried out in its name. This correspondence marked the first time the Unabomber communicated directly with the public, and his veiled threat of future violence evoked concern.
Hoge immediately reached out to the FBI, both to report the arrival of the letter and to elicit comment for publication. Word of the correspondence and the Times’ inquiry promptly reached FBI director William Sessions’ office, and he was immediately informed of the development. Sessions, who had flown out of DC that morning and happened to be on his way to San Francisco to appear at an event unrelated to the UNABOM investigation, quickly amended his schedule to include a stop at FBI headquarters to address staff and hold a press conference. At the time, Sessions was under fire for his mishandling of expense money and improper use of a Gulfstream V jet. Some suspected he’d planned the trip to California in order to escape DC for a bit. Now, however, he had no way to escape additional scrutiny.
As head of the UNABOM task force, Webb elected to meet Sessions at the airport and accompany him back to the office. During the drive, he began to update Sessions with the latest developments in the case, but their conversation was interrupted by a call from the White House. Webster Hubbell, President Clinton’s assistant, was phoning to say that Clinton was prepared to fire Sessions immediately and that he should return to Washington as soon as his obligations in San Francisco were finished. Hubbell had a booming Southern voice, and Webb and the others in the vehicle could hear every word he said.
An awkward silence took over in the car, and for the rest of the ride, no one spoke. When they arrived at the federal building on Golden Gate Avenue, Sessions gave five minutes’ worth of tepid remarks to the staff, followed by a clumsy press conference. Sessions advised the media that the FBI had sent a message by computer network to most universities, and to professors in particular, alerting them to be wary of suspicious packages, particularly those with excessive postage, misspelled words, incorrect titles, or no return address. Following the press, Sessions went off to give his scheduled speech, then returned to the airport for a flight back to DC.
Examiners at the FBI lab in DC ultimately determined that the letter to the Times had been typed using an LC Smith Corona with 2.54 spacing, the same typewriter used in many of the earlier UNABOM attacks, further confirming what many at the agency already suspected. The Unabomber was back, sparking renewed focus on the investigation and incited concern with those at the highest levels of law enforcement. The lab technicians also made another startling discovery. When viewing the letter under ultraviolet light, they observed indented writing. They were able to decipher the words: CALL NATHAN R. WED 7 PM. Finally, a clue, but what did it mean?
Perhaps the letter writer had mistakenly written the words on a second piece of paper that he’d placed over the one he sent to the New York Times, not realizing they would imprint onto the page beneath it. If so, then who was Nathan R? An accomplice, perhaps? More plausible was the possibility that the editor or someone else at the newspaper had scribbled a note to himself that had accidentally transposed onto the letter from FC. There was no way to know for sure. Still, it was a clue to be followed.
Up to this point, the UNABOM investigation had been left to Webb and his small squad. Now it would become far bigger as federal agencies dramatically increased their involvement. The following week, Agent Webb and his case agent, John Conway, were on their way to DC for a meeting at FBI headquarters to discuss the latest developments and learn of next steps.