BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Who would've thought that a passion for word puzzles would lead to the capture of a vicious domestic terrorist that had been evading the law for 17 years? Bombs had been exploding across the nation, and authorities were desperate to unearth the culprit, whom they dubbed the Unabomber.
That's when newly conscripted FBI profiler Jim "Fitz" Fitzgerald noted a curious pattern in the writings of one of the suspects. "I've always enjoyed crossword puzzles, scrabble, cryptograms," he says, seated at a corner table in a restaurant here. "I'm an avid reader and all of a sudden I'm thrust in the middle of a case that's been going on for 17 years, and as a brand-new profiler. 'Hey, did anybody read this manifesto yet?'"
The manifesto was pages of incendiary commentary sent by an anonymous writer and later printed in a national newspaper. "They'd examined it for physical evidence but I said, 'Did anybody read the content of it, break it down into its language parts?' They said to run with it."
Run with it he did. The story of that marathon is the subject of the series, "Manhunt: Unabomber" airing on the Discovery Channel.
Fitzgerald, who has a master's degree in linguistics, studied every comma, period and hyphenation of the documents that the suspect had written. "Within a day I found something that was written in a 1985 letter by the Unabomber and I read down the left-hand column, and it spelled out: 'Dad it is I.' I wasn't sure if it had any real significance, but I took it to the boss, the special agent in charge who was running the Unabomber task force in San Francisco. He said, 'We've had this letter for 10 years and no one has picked it up. You're in charge of all the language in this case from now on.'"
(That incident gave birth to what is now an accepted part of crime solving known as forensic linguistics, which eventually led to the capture of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.)
"There were academics before me, other linguists who had been doing some civil work with language," says Fitzgerald. "One of them was Dr. Roger Shuy, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. He's the godfather of forensic linguistics in the U.S., and I met with him for about two hours prior to my travels to the Unabomber task force. He'd been provided with the Unabomber's manifesto before it was made public. He was really the first person to open my eyes to the value of language as evidence."
The next observation Fitzgerald made was a strangely twisted expression used in the manifesto. "Paragraph 185 _ I'll never forget _ 'the evils of technology ... Well you can't eat your cake and have it too.' I didn't pick up on it the first time, but the second time I said, 'Wait a minute. "You can't eat your cake and have it too." I say, "You can't have your cake and eat it too."'
I finally found a mistake. And he never made mistakes. The Unabomber was a perfect writer. He would X out a few words, but he picked up almost every mistake and actually put a three-page correction page in front of the manifesto like an old-time 1940 dissertation or thesis. This is how OCD he was about his language, because it was essentially perfect. Here, I found a mistake," recalls Fitzgerald, who served 11 years as a police officer before he joined the FBI.
The real breakthrough came when Fitzgerald was scrutinizing 178 other documents that Kaczynski had written over the years to his family. The papers had been surrendered by Kaczynski's brother, David, who began to suspect that his sibling might be the Unabomber.
"So here we are with 2,500 suspects and David Kaczynski calls and says he has this document from back in '71 ... It was my job to look at everything Ted ever wrote his mother and brother and try to compare them to all the words in the 14 Unabomber documents," says Fitzgerald.
"I was the first one to see all the documents as (the family) would send them in. I would break them down and read every single document that this guy, Ted Kaczynski, wrote. I wasn't convinced he was the Unabomber, but this thing he wrote in '71 and the manifesto were damn close in theme, in topic, in wording. So I'm sitting with my feet on the desk, and it's an early '70s letter-to-the-editor to the Saturday Review Magazine. I'm reading it, and he goes, 'abusing the earth,' and 'weather conditions' and 'over population.' No smoking gun yet, till we get down to the second to last sentence: 'Well, you can't eat your cake and have it too.' That was my Eureka moment in late March of '96."
Fitzgerald is played by actor Sam Worthington ("Avatar") in the drama, costarring Chris Noth, Jane Lynch, and Paul Bettany as Kaczynski. "Manhunt: Unabomber" is the first in a series of scripted anthologies set to air on the Discovery Channel.
'RIVERDALE' GETS A SECOND CHANCE
It was a bit of a risk when the CW decided to create a reboot of the "Archie" comics with a "Twin Peaks" twist into the series "Riverdale." Now that the show has enjoyed a season, CW President Mark Pedowitz, says he intends to stick with it though the regular TV ratings weren't as bully as he would've wished. "But we knew going in _ as we positioned ourselves as a multi-platform network _ that we were going to see ... and I was comforted by Rick Haskins, who is my head of marketing and digital, who said, 'Don't worry. The numbers will come out in delayed viewing and in digital.' And you know what? They did. It has just registered. And it's now on Netflix, from what we've heard through anecdotal conversation, it's a big hit on Netflix. We're seeing massive responses to it on social media. How that translates come the fall, whether it will impact our linear ratings or it impacts our digital, I don't care," he says. "As long as people are watching it, and they can find it, we're happy."
'NOVA' TO TRACE THE ECLIPSE
You don't have to expose your peepers to the sun when the Great American Eclipse occurs on Aug. 21. Let PBS' "Nova" do it for you. The cosmic stunner will pass through 14 states, making it the first to cross the U.S. since 1918. Starting at 10:15 a.m. PT the lunar shadow will take one hour and 33 minutes to travel from Oregon to South Carolina, allowing continuous observation for 90 minutes. And "Nova" will offer a special presentation just hours after its bow. ("Eclipse Over America" will air at 9 p.m. check local listings). Not only will they dog teams working on solar science and storm detection, they'll incorporate CGI animation, NASA footage, and include backyard footage from various public television stations along the path.
TV SHOW FEATURES BOTH SIDES
The idea for CBS' new version of the TV series, "S.W.A.T." arriving this fall, came from his childhood, says executive producer Aaron Rahsaan Thomas. "Growing up in the Midwest, in Kansas City, Kan., I grew up in a neighborhood that had a very complicated view towards police officers," he says.
"On one hand, a 12-year-old kid, who was a neighbor of mine, was shot and killed by a police officer. On the other hand, another neighbor of mine was an actual police officer. So we had a love-hate relationship with police growing up. I always felt as though someone who understood both sides of the Black-Lives-Matter and Blue-Lives-Matter debate would make for a fascinating character. So, when it came time to think about show ideas, this idea of a character _ to marry that with an iconic title like 'S.W.A.T.' just seemed to be to me a really, really great place to start."
