Roll of the Dice

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1:05Hi, it's Phoebe. Today we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from our friends at the show Project Unabomb. Project Unabomb is an Apple original podcast about Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who planted bombs around the country for nearly 20 years. He died in prison in June. But the story we're bringing you today isn't about him. Before we begin, this episode contains mentions of suicide. Please use discretion. Here's Eric Benson. It's the early summer, 1978. A college kid named Greg has just come home to Evanston, Illinois, a suburb just north of Chicago. He's a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI, in New York State, studies mechanical engineering.

1:57He's finished up his classes and come home a couple weeks early to start his summer job working for the city forestry department, trimming trees, that kind of thing. One day, in early June, he rides his bike back home from work. And I pulled up to my house, and there was nobody around. I just started walking in, and I was approached by two men in black suits. And they said, are you Greg? I said, yes. And they said, we found your bomb. And I said, what bomb? We bleeped Greg's name because he asked us not to use his full name. So anyway, these guys in black suits introduced themselves. They're special agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF.

2:37At first I thought I could try to help them. But then as I invited them to the house to have more discussions, then they started getting pretty confrontational with me. And they asked things like, you know, why'd you leave college early? Do you always take the easy way out? and just clearly not trying to see whether or not I could have done it or not, but trying to make me angry enough that I'd disclose something that they were looking for, some kind of information. They kept asking the same questions over and over again, too. They asked questions about an engineering professor at RPI named E.J.

3:14Smith. Greg had just finished taking his class. And I was his only student in Chicago, Illinois at the time, and I took an incomplete in the class because it was my one final, I wanted to get back and start earning some money at the job that I had set up in Chicago. The ATF explains that a bomb had been placed in a mailing envelope that had been discovered on May 25th between two cars in a parking lot at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. A day later, a security guard opened it, got some minor injuries. But investigators figured the parking lot wasn't its intended destination. The package had been stamped and addressed to Greg's RPI engineering professor, E.J.

3:57Smith, in upstate New York. And as the ATF is questioning him, it's clear they're accusing Greg of trying to send it to him. Again and again, they press him on what he thinks of Professor Smith. I did tell them that he was a very poor professor. Nobody in the class seemed to like the guy. He was the sort of person at that point that had transparencies. transparencies, and he would just flip one as fast as he could to get through the class, and nobody could keep up with him at all. When people asked him to slow down, he just laughed at them.

4:28But Professor Smith wasn't the only reason the ATF was focusing on Greg. It turned out that the return address on the package was for a professor at Northwestern University named Buckley Crist. And Greg had a specific connection to him, too. Actually, his mother did. She worked in the material science department, where Professor Chris was one of the three professors that she was essentially a secretary for. Do you remember this? I mean, that's a crazy coincidence. What did you think? I thought it was an amazing coincidence, yes. All these coincidences seemed to add up to me being a suspect. So the ATF has found Professor E.J.

5:12Smith's only student from Chicago. And it so happens that student has just taken an incomplete in Smith's course and come home early, in time to place the bomb. And his mom works for the guy whose name is on the return address? That's either a smoking gun, or it's some wild thought experiment in probability. The Unabomb investigation was one of the longest and most frustrating manhunts in the history of American law enforcement. 18 years, multiple agencies, task forces that would convene, investigate for a few months, find nothing, and then disband. And when I first read about the long, fruitless search for the Unabomber, I kept wondering.

5:53If no one at the FBI had even heard the name Ted Kaczynski until February 1996, two months before his arrest, who were they investigating prior to that? That's what this episode is about. This is a story that's never been reported before. You won't find the people we're going to talk to mentioned in any book on the Unabomber. The most that's ever been written about them is a passing mention to a group of suspects who spent a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons. But what really happened to these guys is kind of incredible. Jobs were lost, friendships were destroyed, lives were altered, as the Unabomber investigation veered off course from the very start.

6:39We'll be right back.

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7:50So in June 1978, as Greg is being interrogated by these two ATF agents at his parents' house, across town, two other ATF agents are talking to one of his friends, a guy Greg has known since high school named Jeff Ward. What did you, do you remember what you thought? Well, the first thing I thought was, how on God's green earth can they think it was us? And second, yeah, I'll talk to these guys because they're going to soon find out it couldn't possibly be us and I have nothing to worry about. So I was confident that they'd talk to us, this would be it, and they'd be on to who might have really done it.

8:26And, you know, my father, he was the smart one. He said he wanted to send them away. And I said, you know, no, I'll talk to him. I have nothing to hide. But I mean, they were trying to get at, essentially, who would send a bomb to Professor Smith addressed from Professor Christ. After a couple hours, the agents left. And Jeff picks up the phone to call Greg to tell him about this crazy thing that just happened. I think I called and didn't get through. And so I drove up to North Evanston and it was kind of like, whoa, do you know what just happened? That's what I wanted to do. and then I walk into him being interviewed.

9:03And they're like, bonanza, let's talk to these two guys together. So Jeff and Greg are both there, these 19-year-olds, no lawyers. And Jeff, he starts mouthing off. He's a real character, and he likes to challenge authority. This is Greg again. I think at that point, he was giving the agents a hard time. Of course, he had already been questioned. They may have been part of it. You know, here I am, a smartass, sitting in on this interview where they ask the most banal and stupid questions. And that's when I probably did one of the more stupid things of my life. I got so fed up after what was turning out to be four hours of interview, I finally said to the ATF agents, look, if we wanted to kill people and we don't, there would be much better ways to do it than a matchstick bomb.

9:50And of course, that perked them up. And they asked me to explain the better ways which I proceeded to do. And that's probably the point at which I started to become the main target of the investigation.

10:08At first, Jeff and Greg are on high alert, especially after the agents ask Greg to take a polygraph test, and the examiner finds he has, quote, unexplained emotional reactions. But that fall, when Greg goes back to school, it seems like the whole thing is blown over. Every once in a while, he and Jeff get this weird feeling they're being watched, but nothing happens. They figure they're just being paranoid. After a while, they don't even think about it anymore. So much so, they don't even remember it being a big deal when another bomb goes off in May 1979. This one is placed inside the Technological Institute at Northwestern, where Professor Buckley Crist and Greg's mom work.

10:48The bomb is inside a cigar box, wrapped in red polka dot wrapping paper. A graduate student opens it. The bomb causes cuts and burns and momentary blindness due to the bright flash. But that's it. It barely makes the news. Then, five months later, on November 15, 1979... The FBI says an American Airlines 727 with 80 persons aboard landed safely today at Washington's Dulles International Airport after a small bomb exploded in a mail pouch in the cargo hold. The flight had taken off from O 'Hare in Chicago. But like those other bombs, it doesn't do much damage. Oxygen masks deploy and the plane makes an emergency landing.

11:30But other than some smoke inhalation, the passengers and the crew escape without injuries. But a bomb on a commercial airliner? That's a major crime. That falls under the purview of the FBI. The Bureau's explosives unit examines the device, and the way it was made seems unusual. Parts of it are hand-carved out of wood. The rest looks like it was assembled from a junkyard. The examiner said he'd looked at thousands of bombs before and never seen anything like this. So they send a photo of the device to law enforcement in Chicago and say, look familiar? Agents there say, yes. It looks like the bomb that was placed at Northwestern and like the one found in the parking lot that was addressed to Professor E.J.

12:15Smith. Three bombs, similar construction, a pattern, and it didn't stop. June 10, 1980, seven months after the airline bomb. The president of United Airlines, a guy named Percy Wood, opens a package in his home in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. There's a book inside. It's hollowed out and stuffed with explosives. He opens it. Percy Wood is rushed to the hospital, where fragments of the bomb are removed from his face and hands. He survives.

12:48They don't make it public, but the FBI is now certain. There's a serial bomber on the loose in Chicago. They dubbed the investigation Unibomb, for university and airline bombings. And now that it's a significant case, law enforcement looks back at the original suspects for the first bomb, Greg and Jeff. And it turns out there's something suspicious about them besides Greg's connection to E.J. Smith and Buckley Crist. For years, Jeff has been meeting up with a group of Northwestern students, sometimes at the Technological Institute, where the second bomb was placed. Greg has occasionally tagged along.

13:26Jeff had started hanging out with this crew when he was still in high school. It was really cool for, you know, as a high school kid even, that I hung out with graduate students at Northwestern. You know, because they were smart. It was fascinating to learn all the physics, all the chemistry, lasers, the whole thing. All these guys spent a lot of their time playing elaborate role-playing games. There's Dungeons and Dragons, The cliche thing nerdy guys did in the 70s and 80s. Teenagers gathering around a kitchen table at night, basically creating a wild fantasy story together. It's like the Lord of the Rings, but with dice.

14:02And so you could be a habit, you could be an elf, you could be a ranger, you could be whatever, and you roamed whatever world the Dungeon Master created in search of fame, treasure, and fortune. You kill orcs, you get killed, and, you know, it's basically one of the best escapes on the planet.

14:27And it's not just D &D. They're really into these giant war games. There's one where they reenact Napoleon's invasion of Russia with little figurines. Another where they have big naval battles with metal ships. Jeff and his friends even have a name for the group. We called ourselves the North Shore General Staff. North Shore, for the well-off lakeside suburbs of Chicago, where three of the first four bombs went off.

15:00It's a Tuesday night, January 20, 1981. Earlier that day, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. Three guys from the North Shore general staff are sitting in their third-floor walk-up apartment, a few miles from the Northwestern campus. One of them is named Dave White. He's an extremely committed war gamer, even by the standards of that group. It's around 7 p.m., he remembers, and he and his two roommates hear a knock at the door. And I opened the door, and there's six FBI agents there. And they said something to the effect of, Mr. White, can we come in? And knowing what I know today, I probably would have said, no, please contact my attorney unless you have a search warrant.

15:42But I didn't. I was young and I said, sure, come on in. And immediately they treated us like we were guilty of something. They acted as if we were all in coordination in creating and sending bombs through the mail, which was frankly the first we had ever paid any attention to this. Yes, there had been news reports and yes, there had been an event or two connected with Northwestern, But, you know, we didn't think it had anything to do with us, and we weren't really paying attention to those.

16:18These agents are asking very specific questions that seem random to the point of absurdity. One of them asked Dave, how often do you eat Bugle's corn chips? Another friend gets asked to write out the name Enoch W. Fisher in cursive. Do any of them have a stamp collection? Who among them is meticulous? Do they act out their war games in real life? At least one agent floats a theory. It all started out as a joke. The bombing. E.J. Smith, Buckley Crist. But now it's gone too far. This scene isn't just playing out in Dave's apartment. Other agents have fanned out across Evanston to question the other North Shore general staffers.

16:57Two agents to each suspect. Here's Jeff. They were hanging their hats on the slimmest of evidence. They thought we played with carbide cannons. We never did. You know, Greg made a mock-up of a cannon, I want to say, in a shop class. I mean, all these tall tales were coming out. This was true. Greg says it was a little aluminum cannon that he machined in class. Stood about six inches high. They saw that as experimenting with explosives, although it had no, you know, obviously it had never been exploded, didn't have any kind of way to light a fuse to it. But they thought that was suspicious. The agents want to know if Greg had intentionally controlled his breath on the polygraph test he took in 1978.

17:41They ask if he thought anyone might be trying to frame him. They want to know if he's willing to die for his friends. And then there's the wood connection, which seems like it might be a real problem for Greg. They found a tree twig during one of the bombs, and they felt that it might have been related to my job in the forestry department. And how is that connected to you? Because I worked, I trimmed trees in the forestry department. Got it. Jeff's also hearing about wood, that the bombs all have some kind of symbolic connection to wood. You know, there was the bomb to Percy Wood in Lake Forest, and Greg worked for the forestry department in Evanston.

18:21Wood, I mean, some of the stuff is so far-fetched. But when you have no one else, when you have no other possibility, you focus on what you have. And I also think we made it far too interesting for them. We all should have really just shut up. The theories simultaneously get more ridiculous and more damning. In addition to war games, the North Shore general staff plays in a touch football league. Some agents wonder, maybe they're using code and talking about their plans while they're on the field. Oh, God. Yeah, you know, let's, yes, it got back to me that the FBI asked a friend, and I don't know what friend.

19:00Please don't ask me. Well, before games, does Jeff Ward say, let's blow him away? Or, you know, let's hit him with the bomb? Long pass, which was one of our specialties. Oh, yeah. Everything became proof that we had done it.

19:23At some point, relatively quickly, we got together and part of it was just uproarious laughter that anyone could suspect us of anything like this. I mean, none of us had the skill set. Well, OK, to be fair, none of us had the skill set to do the airline bomb. You know, the earlier bombs anybody could have done.

19:48do you have any idea how the atf the fbi just let's go you know law enforcement got from suspecting greg might have had an axe to grind with ej smith and then could have sent the bomb to suspecting this wider group of people because of the dungeons and dragons that that's the easy answer right there. Back in 1980, you know, the 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons to some people was seen as a cult. Dungeons and Dragons has been called the most effective introduction to the occult. It is a fantasy role-playing game. The fear of Dungeons and Dragons fit in with the larger satanic panic movement happening in the U.S.

20:31at the time. The idea that kids listening to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and playing with Ouija boards would fall under the lure of Satan and join cults. This wasn't just some fear-mongering from right-wing evangelicals. The idea went mainstream. About two months ago, a green eyeball was seen up in the sky. This eyeball was so big, it blotted out the sun, okay? These young people are playing Dungeons & Dragons. This is from a 1985 60-minute story on D &D that looked into allegations that kids had murdered people or died by suicide after playing Dungeons & Dragons. One mother whose son took his own life describes finding out after his death that he played D &D.

21:12We went into the kitchen and there on the table were what we thought were just regular composition books with schoolwork in it and much of the Dungeons & Dragons material along with this curse he had received in the game that day that he died. The curse that was placed on Bink's D &D character began, your soul is mine, I choose the time. Though 60 Minutes acknowledges you can't reduce murder or suicide to just one simple cause, a psychiatrist they interview in the story blames 28 deaths on the influence of the game. For instance, one case, the parents actually saw their child summon Dungeons & Dragons demons into his room before he killed himself.

21:55Another case, the kid thought he had the ability to astral travel coming from the Dungeons & Dragons game, that he could leave his body and come back. FBI agents had questioned both Greg and Jeff about D &D specifically. Greg was pointedly asked if anyone had acted strangely while they were playing it. Jeff had gotten these kind of questions too, questions that kind of set him up to rat someone out. At first, I think they thought it was me or us. But then when, you know, clearly I had no clue, it kind of turned into a little bit more of, well, who from your group could possibly have done this?

22:32And I was like, there is nobody I know that has any kind of axe to grind of this nature. And if they did, they certainly haven't told me.

22:46So Greg and Jeff, each of them knows they're not the bomber. And they also don't suspect the other one. There's certain Greg's connection to the first bomb is just a big coincidence. The other member of the North Shore general staff you've heard from, Dave White, He felt the same way. I sat down and talked with the FBI. And I tried to explain to him, I don't think any of these people have anything to do with this. If they did, I'd have known about it. Dave says in the first interview with the FBI, they ran through every member of the North Shore General Staff. And they kept trying to push me. It's like, are you sure?

23:20Could it be this person? Could it be that person? I'm like, no, it's not him. You know, I know him. I know him really well. No, they're not those kind of people. And they came back to me. Well, what about Jeff? I said, well, I don't really know Jeff that well, but I didn't think he was capable of doing this from what the FBI was telling me. The Unabomber was very meticulous, very focused in his work, and Jeff was just not focused that way. If it sounds like Dave is talking shit about Jeff, it's because he is. They were roommates for a couple years, and they didn't really get along. Jeff claims it was because he was the better athlete.

23:57Anyway, Dave tells the FBI Jeff couldn't be the Unabomber because of his lack of focus. It would come up during their war games, while Dave would take hours to intricately paint the pewter figurines that made up his army. Jeff would not. We actually had some problems where when Jeff would field an army, he'd buy the cheapest miniatures you could get, usually plastic, and he'd paint them one color. Just like all red or all yellow. And we kind of had to say, Jeff, you know, come on, get with the program. You know, if you're going to put miniatures out here, put a little effort into it. So it couldn't be Jeff.