Armchair Detective

By David S. Jackson/San Francisco

Three years ago, MILTON JONES was watching a Nightline report on the still unsolved Unabomber case. At the time, investigators were trying to figure out the meaning of the wooden components found in the bombs and the references to wood and other elements of nature in the choice of victims. Jones, then studying American literature at Brigham Young University, theorized that the Unabomber was using a literary device known as juxtaposition. By mailing a bomb to a person named Wood or someone living on Aspen Drive, the Unabomber was saying technology was destroying nature. But by making the bomb partly out of wood and selecting victims who represented the advance of technology, he was sending a second message: Technology was destroying both itself and nature. Intrigued, the FBI asked for more, and a year before the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski, Jones predicted the Unabomber would turn out to be an intellectual, a conservationist, a loner, possibly a college teacher, familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad, and would see himself as if in "a war to save the world." But Jones couldn't give the FBI a name, and all he got after the arrest was a polite note. Now a teacher at Utah Valley State College, Jones has written Kaczynski, asking how much of his theorizing was right.

--By David S. Jackson/San Francisco