Hunting the Unabomber by Lis Wiehl

Author:Lis Wiehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Turchie was determined to develop a full understanding of all the elements of the investigation—including the all-important computerized database that held promise for advancing the agents’ work and potentially providing the team with some lead that would allow them to finally get closer to their elusive suspect.

He had been informed about the new computer system the bureau had acquired, and during his first weeks in the office, he made a point of introducing himself to Casey Henderson, the man in charge of getting the data scanned in and the database up and running. Casey Henderson was an independent contractor the FBI had hired to build the database in the Sun SPARC computer. Henderson and his wife and young daughter lived in Washington, DC; he’d opted to move to San Francisco on a temporary basis to do the job for the FBI. Henderson regularly flew into and out of San Francisco International Airport, returning home to visit his wife and daughter.

Task force members had been bringing all this information into the division from all these years of investigation and had been told that as they fed all the material into the massive parallel processor, or MPP, they were going to have an answer. The cutting-edge computer was going to analyze all the data, find the commonalities, and throw out the name of the Unabomber—or at least that was the theory. Just about everyone in the San Francisco office figured the likelihood of that happening was on par with the building getting hit by a meteor.

For the past seven months, Henderson had been working brutally long hours—routinely working until late in the evening and sometimes through the night. He’d limit himself to fifteen-minute breaks when he couldn’t continue.

“He worked in that office for a solid year on this data,” Turchie told me. “His whole deal was to make the computer network work.” In addition to all the case files, Henderson was also inputting videotaped footage into the MPP. For instance, the postal service had issued a number of subpoenas over the years to universities such as Northwestern where bombings had occurred and where CCTV was operational. Postal and other agencies had those tapes in their UNABOM files, and Henderson was charged with inputting them into the Sun SPARC system. If all went according to plan, the system was expected to be up and searchable by June, less than two months away.

Turchie had taken that June completion date into account when drawing up his own strategic plan for the UNABOM investigation. He figured that by that point, the team would be proactively identifying suspects—and Henderson would put his massive machine to work.

“We were going to start giving him specific kinds of computer runs to do,” Turchie said. “The database would allow us to better track individuals, pull together facts from diverse sources, and ultimately allow us to hone our searches.”

But as so often happens in life—and in investigations—things didn’t go quite as planned. About two or three months after Turchie arrived in San Francisco, Henderson walked into his office to deliver some bad news.

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