ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, June 26, 1996 TAG: 9606260058
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
At first, the Unabomber built the wooden boxes that carried his deadly cargo with wood from trees indigenous to the Midwest.
"Later, it was kind of curious, we started seeing species that grow in the Western U.S. begin to appear," Virginia Tech wood sciences Professor Mark White said.
White speaks from experience. When the FBI went looking for someone to help analyze the Unabomber's boxes, they called him.
Originally, investigators suspected the bombs' boxes may have been built from wood containers or pallets used by manufacturers to ship goods, White said.
He runs the only lab in the country that studies the performance of wood pallets and containers.
"That's how they eventually came to me," he said Tuesday, the same day Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski pleaded not guilty in a California courtroom to federal charges in the case.
White first traveled to the FBI labs in Washington to examine bomb remnants in January 1995. Some months later, two FBI agents arrived at the Tech campus bearing a unique load: Plastic bags containing bomb fragments.
White set up his microscope and went to work. What clues might the wood shavings reveal? Would it hint at the Unabomber's identity?
Investigators had suspected someone with ties to the Chicago area and to Northern California. White examined fragments ranging from Midwestern cottonwood to West Coast redwood.
In addition to identifying the tree species, White saw hints about the Unabomber himself emerge.
"Someone makes a complicated structure, someone paints a painting, and you can begin to see the person's personality in that," White said.
These boxes were "meticulously made. The construction was chaotic. A lot of small pieces were put together, but some pieces didn't make sense. Meticulous, but also crude. However, unfortunately, they work."
The cutting seemed to be done with dull tools. The wood, rather than from pallets or containers, was simply scrap wood, White said.
"Clearly, somebody didn't run down to the local hardware store and buy pieces of wood cut to fit."
Fairly large pieces were left over from boxes built at the beginning of the Unabomber's nearly 20-year bombing spree. Later boxes were reduced to shards.
In all, White spent three days with the agents and also talked with them by phone. "They were doing everything they could," White said.
And while White says he was not particularly worried for his own safety, secrecy was the watchword. The father of two was concerned for his family, and the Unabomber had hit college campuses before. He also seemed to have a fascination with wood, White noted.
That's why the campus police got involved when word that a Tech professor was involved in the case somehow reached a reporter at WSLS (Channel 10) some months before Kaczynski's April arrest. Campus police around the country had been on alert for years. And Tech Police Chief Mike Jones had once detonated a suspicious package that turned out to be a box of videotapes.
"Not knowing who the Unabomber was and the fact there was some work being done at the university - we were concerned. We didn't want anyone to know about it," Jones said.
Jones and Tech spokesman David Nutter met with the station's news director and the reporter working on the story. News Director Bill Foy, who says the reporter didn't know the professor's identity, called their request that they hold the story "absolutely the most legitimate request I felt like I'd ever heard."
It's only once every year or two that the station would agree to such a request, Foy said.
"We were very, very fearful of the implications if it got out," Nutter said.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. Mark White, professor of wood sciencesby CNBat Virginia Tech, helped the FBI determine the origin of wood chips
found in Unabomber bomb fragments.