By Dan Bodine

Did the notorious Unabomber who died in prison just recently at age 81 — authorities are saying by suicide — ever eat at the old City of Presidio TX’s Senior Citizen Center when he was on the lamb decades ago?

When the Center was on O’Reilly Street downtown? Years before the city built a new facility, up on the hill?

Or was it his brother instead?

Or, just another wild-eyed drifter? (Presidio has known a few, yes!)

Yeah, this is one of those “can-of-worms” stories journalists hesitate getting off into without better resources.

This guy was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at one time, teaching Mathematics — years later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Life, indeed, can be a moveable feast!

Hang in with me here a moment or two though. Maybe I can tell this story with some credibility. It involves hearsay I’ve carried around in my head for years. Spill it now or never, I guess. But background first.

Theodore (Ted) J. Kaczynski … convicted in an 18-yr. string of terrorist bombings that killed three and maimed scores more, had been sentenced to life in prison. He was found unresponsive in his cell and declared dead Saturday (June 10) at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina.

In 1998 he was “sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

“Years before the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the ‘Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.”

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My problem writing this now is that I can’t remember the name of a state investigator in Alpine sometime in the mid-to-late ’90s who first told me this story. Nor the agency he was with! [What I really need is some of those old journalists in Ojinaga! Talk about knowing the scoop!]

I remember only that the complaint — as it got to him — was that a gringo stranger (somewhat disheveled, yes) was living underneath the old U. S. Hwy. 67 bridge just north of the Balia Inn (now 3 Palms Restaurant) sometimes — I’m guessing here — in early-to-mid ’90s, apparently at or just after construction had just started on re-routing the highway from its old downtown route.

Engineers looped Hwy. 67 directly to the bridge on the Rio Grande crossing into Ojinaga, Chih., MX, and eventually abandoned that old highway section of land north of the Balia for 2-3 miles.

But this stranger underneath the old bridge had developed a daily habit of coming into the Sr. Citizens Center and eating a noon meal, this state inspector told me.

And his appearance and apparent odor were making the regular luncheon clients at the Center nervous, this Alpine official told me. (I want to say Joe [something], so hereafter I’ll simply quote “Joe.“)

“So I drove down (from Alpine) to Presidio one day to that bridge, and found him,” Joe more-or-less said. “And he admitted that, yes, he was going down to the Sr. Center for lunch.”

And then he questioned if there was a problem with that.

“You’re scaring the old people!” Joe finally told him. “They’d prefer you don’t go into that Sr. Citizens Center again, OK?”

And Joe then added in his telling of it, “The guy was very nice! And he told me, ‘OK, I won’t go anymore if it’s a problem.'”

So, what happened to him after that?

Joe told me he didn’t know for certain, only he thought the guy somehow or another had disappeared [and here, I simply can’t remember which one he said], either “across the river” — e.g., into Ojinaga, Chih., MX — or, “down the river” — e.g., toward Lajitas and Terlingua.

So…Scanning the internet this past week, I came across some things. It adds to the mystery some, but doesn’t provide an answer.

One, Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski and his wife, residents of Schenectady, N.Y., owned some land in far West Texas — in the Chalk Mountains area of Brewster County just off U.S. Hwy 67.

And years before his brother’s arrest, who was living remotely in a small cabin in Montana and wanting someone to correspond with, David had referred him to someone from Ojinaga — who’d occasionally done work for them on this property he was on.

Thus began a 7-yr “pen-pal” correspondence with a “peasant” named Juan Sanchez Arreola. His letters were discovered when authorities moved in on the Unabomber’s cabin and arrested him in the mail bombings.

Sanchez had a legal visa to enter the United States and often traveled to regional farms and such to work.

“Kaczynski began the correspondence in 1988 with Juan Sanchez Arreola, a 68-year-old peasant from Chihuahua, after learning of him from his brother, David Kaczynski,” a New York Times reporter wrote in a story carried in the Chicago Tribune April 10, 1996. “David had met Sanchez in the early 1980s after buying [this Brewster County] property in the nearby Chalk Mountains of West Texas.”

And the “Juan Sanchez” letters touched off no less than a brouhaha in Ojinaga, of course.

“Everyone was talking about it!” a close confidante told me, a former resident of Ojinaga herself then. “It was on radio, el periódicos (newspapers)…”

But I ran into a conflict between the “property in the nearby Chalk Mountains” and some land David had bought in the Terlingua Ranch earlier.

Or were they the same? And in the vastness of Texas, writers thousands of miles away looking at maps simply got confused? Texas Monthly June 1996 had the Terlingua cabin in The Last Refuge story.

“There is no crime in being the kind of loner that David Kaczynski was. He was a loner who could love. He loved nature, so much so that he slept in a hand-dug hole for a couple of years while building his cabin, that he might remain close to the desert. He loved Linda Patrik, the woman whose initials he wrote with his own in the cabin’s concrete foundation—loved her so much, in fact, that in 1990 he moved to Schenectady to be her husband, thereafter returning to the desert only in the winter.”

And with both brothers alike, answering the call of simplicity and nature, in “Unabomb suspect, brother a lot alike,” April 14,1996 and revised Sept. 5, 2005, a writer in the Tampa Bay Times adds a footnote to this little Terlingua cabin.

“In 1991, a few months after his father’s death, David Kaczynski married his high school sweetheart, Linda Patrik. High on the hillside here, he expanded his tin-roofed cottage and brought in electricity so his new wife could use a computer. In the fresh concrete of the cabin’s foundation, the couple etched a heart and their initials: LP and DK.

“Busy with a new life as a social worker in Albany, N.Y., David Kaczynski now only returns to his mountain cabin here when he and his wife, a college philosophy professor, can schedule joint vacations.”

Thus while both were alike in many ways, Ted became the Unabomber. And David — much more civil, yes — became the one who finally turned him into authorities.

Ted had convinced The Washington Post if it would publish a “manifesto” he’d written, he’d halt the mail bombings. It was a rant against modern technology and dehumanization.

“The manifesto was published by The Washington Post as an eight-page supplement on Sept. 19, 1995″

Afterward, David and his wife in New York read it, put two and two together, and tipped off authorities where in Montana they could find the person they were looking for –in a remote mountain cabin. A moral duty.

Being a “paranoid schizophrenic” may have been assisted, too, was another tidbit I found.

It’s on one of the history.com feeds I enjoy going thru — e. g., a wild experiment he volunteered for as a teen brainchild attending Harvard University.

Still being used by the C.I.A., it was designed to be used to interrogate captured enemies of war then. Complaints about its bad effects on subjects’ personalities though not soon after this was cause for the test to be dropped.

Another tidbit along Life’s moveable feast.

And I’m still uncertain about just who was living under the bridge north of Presidio — e. g., who ate at the Sr. Citizens Center?

The Unabomber? En route to his pen pal’s home in OJ?

Or his brother, en route to his Terlingua cabin?

Or just another weird person passing thru historic Presidio?

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