It must have been May 23, 1978. A worker from the University of Illinois found a package in the Chicago campus parking lot. The sender was Buckley Crist, a professor at Northwestern University, so they sent it back. On the afternoon of the 24th they told Crist about it, but he did not remember that he had sent any packages.
Actually, there was only one explanation: drugs. For months it had been said that some students used the name of a professor to move drugs from campus to campus without raising suspicions. So when the package arrived at his office and he confirmed that the handwriting was not his, he called Officer Terry Maker of the campus police.
They opened the package together. That was the first bomb. It took more than 15 years of bombings, injuries and deaths before the FBI detained Ted Kaczynski in a lost cabin in eastern Montana. This story has been told many times, but how could a single man without specialized training build dozens of bombs and hold an entire country in check for a decade and a half? We investigated the technology behind Unabomber.
