Lis Wiehl is the former legal analyst for Fox News and the O’Reilly Factor, and has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the Imus morning shows. The former co-host of WOR radio's WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl, she has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered, as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. She appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst.
Hew new true-crime book is Hunting the Unabomber, which meticulously reconstructs the white-knuckle, tension-filled hunt to identify and capture the mysterious killer, Theodore Kaczynski. For two decades, Kaczynski had masterminded a campaign of random terror, killing and maiming innocent people through bombs sent in untraceable packages. The FBI task force charged with finding the perpetrator of these horrifying crimes grew to 150 people, yet his identity remained a maddening mystery. Then, in 1995, a "manifesto" from the Unabomber was published in the New York Times and Washington Post, resulting in a cascade of tips--including the one that cracked the case.
Lis Wiehl stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the book:
Most people have heard of Ted Kaczynski, aka, the Unabomber, but few know the herculean effort that went on behind the scenes to identify, locate and apprehend this serial bomber responsible for 16 attacks perpetrated over nearly two decades. Before he was done, Ted Kaczynski had killed three and injured 23 others. And thousands had worked as part of the federal UNABOM Task Force to track him down and finally bring him to justice.
Over the years, there had been countless books, TV docuseries, magazine and newspaper articles done on the case, but many of them rang hollow to me. In all the accounts that I’d read and watched, I never got the sense that the media truly had a handle on what happened in the massive and unprecedented effort to track him down. I was determined to find a way to shed new light on the hunt for Ted Kaczynski. I just couldn’t rehash old and tired accounts. How could I tell the story of the more than 500 law enforcement officials aided by countless others that comprised the task force? After many months of research, I finally found a way in.
My quest to bring the story behind the Unabomber Task Force to life took me to the mountains of New Hampshire, where I found former supervisory special agent Patrick Webb, an FBI bomb technician and one of the longest serving members of the UNABOM Task Force. It was there, in his remote country home at the end of a muddy and rutted path, that I found someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the case—and a treasure trove of task force documents. Of all the law enforcement officials who’d worked on the case, Webb stood out because he’d been involved longer than most and knew the full breadth and scope of the task force’s efforts. I became convinced that Webb was my way into the story; he gave me not just the original research materials that I needed but the color and drama that accompanied those documents.
For days, I sat with Webb in a pair of overstuffed chairs by his fireplace, as he described the Task Force’s work and painted a picture of some of the key individuals he’d worked with. He also went out of his way to introduce me to other key players who shared their knowledge of the team’s work. Webb proved to be an unusual find because he’d spent more than a decade on the case. Even some of the most senior members of the UNABOM Task Force were surprised by some of the details Webb was able to offer.
As my research continued, II learned not just about their actions but about the tremendous stress that drove the agents forward day after day. Some of the stress came from senior leaders of the FBI and other federal agencies who were determined to find Kaczynski; but the worst stress came from the agents themselves as they continued to labor even as their investigations failed to turn up anything of use. Task force members plugged away week after week, month after month. They wrote countless reports and investigated thousands of leads. Finally, there was a breakthrough in the case that led them to the Unabomber in his nondescript cabin in the hills of Lincoln, Montana.
In writing Hunting the Unabomber, I sought to take the reader inside the investigation and make them observers of task force meetings where strategy was plotted out, and take them to crime scenes where Webb and other bomb technicians analyzed the devices that had been carefully handcrafted by Kaczynski from bits of pieces of wood and metal that he’d collected. As a former federal prosecutor, I also delve into some of the legal nuances of the case and the efforts that agents went to in creating the intricate case against Kaczynski.
What made the task force’s job all the more incredible to me was that almost all its work took place before the advent of modern computers, video surveillance and other contemporary law enforcement tools. Agents had no choice but to spend countless man hours investigating leads and writing reports. The bombings happened in jurisdictions across the country and involved law enforcement officers, agents and investigators from local, state and federal agencies. I was stunned at just how many leads were followed over the course of this nearly two decades long investigation.
The involvement of so many different investigative agencies made collecting, organizing and synthesizing crime scene evidence, thousands of witness interviews and paramount. It was the UNABOM Task Force that created the FBI’s first-ever unified database—used to identify, locate and capture this serial bomber.
We will forever be indebted to Patrick Webb and the other investigators for helping us to finally bring this story to life. And we firmly believe that even the most avid true crime followers will find something new in this painstakingly researched work.
For more information about Lis Wiehl and the book, check out her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Hunting the Unabomber is available via Thomas Nelson books and all major booksellers.
