In Unabom Case, Pain for Suspect's Family

Even as the evidence mounted, David Kaczynski clung to the hope that his older brother, Theodore, was not the Unabomber.

But to see if there was any merit to his growing suspicions, David Kaczynski engaged one of the nation's most prominent detective agencies, a retired F.B.I. behavioral specialist, a psychiatrist, a linguist, two communications professors and a lawyer.

I think we confirmed his worst fears," said Clinton R. Van Zandt, the behavioral science specialist who retired last year from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he served as the agency's chief hostage negotiator.

Several months before Mr. Kaczynski, through an intermediary, made contact with the F.B.I., he began his own investigation, getting experts to exhaustively evaluate documents and assemble personality profiles. All the while, he withheld from most of those experts his brother's name, identity and even his handwriting.

David Kaczynski's anguished odyssey was guided by conflicting desires, to stop the Unabomber from harming anyone else, and to disprove what his intuition was telling him.

The troubling thoughts that his brother might be involved in the case that had confounded authorities for nearly two decades began late last summer when David Kaczynski and his wife, Linda Patrik, heard news reports about the towns and cities where the Unabomber had been, said Anthony P. Bisceglie, the Washington lawyer who became the intermediary between the family and the F.B.I.

"There was a nagging feeling that their brother, Ted, had some connection to those locations, but it was dismissed," Mr. Bisceglie said at a news conference on Monday.

Then in September, The Washington Post printed the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto in a publication jointly financed by The New York Times. Mr. Bisceglie said Mr. Kaczynski, who works in a youth shelter in Schenectady, N.Y., and whose wife teaches philosophy at Union College, read the manifesto in October. The nagging feeling sharpened.

That month, Mr. Kaczynski and his wife approached Susan Swanson, a private investigator who went to kindergarten with Ms. Patrik in Evergreen Park, a Chicago suburb. Ms. Swanson, who works for Investigative Group Inc., a private investigative firm in Chicago, was contacted as "a family friend," said Paul Browne, a vice president of Investigative Group.

"No money exchanged hands," he said.

For two months, Ms. Swanson quietly looked into the matter, comparing the dates and postmarks of letters Ted Kaczynski had written with public information about the Unabomber's attacks.

In late December, convinced that David Kaczynski's fears had merit, Ms. Swanson contacted the president of Investigative Group, Raymond W. Kelly, the former Police Commissioner of New York City. She did not tell Mr. Kelly the name of her friends or where they lived.

Mr. Kelly suggested that Ms. Swanson consult a handwriting expert and that she also contact Mr. Van Zandt, who runs a security consulting firm in Fredericksburg, Va.

Once again without identifying the possible Unabomber, Ms. Swanson gave Mr. Van Zandt two typewritten transcriptions of what she said were handwritten letters from the suspect. One was about 10 years old and took up four single-spaced pages and one was about a year old and a page of single-spaced typing, Mr. Van Zandt said. The letters had no dates, opening greetings or closing signatures, he said.

Mr. Van Zandt, who in his 25 years with the F.B.I. had sporadic contact with the Unabom case, formed two teams of investigators to compare the letters with the Unabom manifesto. The first team included a psychiatrist and a linguist and Mr. Van Zandt. The group "looked at common sentence structure," phrases and themes, and decided there was a greater than 60 percent probability that the author of the manifesto and the author of the letters were the same person, Mr. Van Zandt said.

The second team involved two academics who specialized in communication analysis and who decided that the probability was 80 percent.

Mr. Van Zandt also put together a psychological profile of the Unabomber, "a male between 45 and 55 with a strong academic background, probably a Ph.D., somebody who had probably taught in a university setting," he said.

Mr. Van Zandt said the person "would really seek to separate himself from society and thought himself to be a superior individual intellectually and otherwise."

With Mr. Van Zandt's conclusions, Mr. Kaczynski asked Ms. Swanson to contact a lawyer and she chose Mr. Bisceglie, a classmate from Antioch Law School in Washington. Mr. Bisceglie did not reveal Mr. Kaczynski's identity in his first contacts with the F.B.I., which were made through an F.B.I. agent Mr. Bisceglie had worked with, not a member of the Unabom task force.

"I spent roughly three months with my office door locked," Mr. Bisceglie said. "We did everything we could to keep a lid on this. And the reason for that was to protect, again, Ted Kaczynski's reputation and also to protect the integrity of the investigation."

There was another reason: the undeniable fear that if Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber, he might try to injure his brother, Mr. Bisceglie said.

Asked at the news conference how David Kaczynski was reacting to the result of his painful actions, Mr. Bisceglie said, "I think he is somewhat in shock."