A steadfast manager of the Central Overland stagecoach line and the Pony Express, the man called Slade could transform—especially when whiskey talked—into a ruffian bent on wrongdoing and self-destruction. On the eve of the Civil War, on the sole street of Julesburg in the northeastern corner of what would become Colorado, two antagonists faced off …
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A rich mouth and a loudmouth sparked reckless gunplay that seemed to involve nearly every man in Ballarat, California, and resulted in the wounding of two deputy sheriffs —two-thirds of the town’s entire sober population. The fusillade of bullets bored more holes in adobe and wood walls than in the human flesh for which it …
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Not all the tracklayers were Irish or strictly meat-and-potatoes men. First of all, they were all Irish. Second, they had to fight Indians every step of the way while laying track. Third, they ate and drank themselves to death on meat and potatoes and rotgut whisky instead of eating vegetables and seafood like the Chinese. …
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Alexis de Tocqueville was sympathetic but not optimistic. In Michigan Territory during the summer of 1831, young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville met Indians not yet burdened with European religion, principles and ideas. But he did not doubt that soon the civilizing process would, by compulsion or choice, transform them, and he was just as …
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The Tombstone woman went after lover with a ‘Bulldog’. Five-foot-four, gray-eyed May Woodman, armed with a nickel-plated Bulldog pistol, walked down Fifth toward Allen Street in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, on February 23, 1883. She approached her lover, William “Billy” Kinsman, and engaged him in a short conversation of unknown subject. As they stood talking in …
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Tragedy struck in Los Angeles’ Chinese quarter. On October 24, 1871, Robert Thompson, a saloonkeeper turned rancher, cautiously approached the front door of a house on Calle de los Negroes (aka “Negro Alley”). The occupants, members of a neighborhood Chinese tong, were quiet now, but they were well armed, and they had shot a police …
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On this day in 1998, in a Sacramento, California, courtroom, Theodore J. Kaczynski pleads guilty to all federal charges against him, acknowledging his responsibility for a 17-year campaign of package bombings attributed to the “Unabomber.”
Born in 1942, Kaczynski attended Harvard University and received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He worked as an assistant mathematics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, but abruptly quit in 1969. In the early 1970s, Kaczynski began living as a recluse in western Montana, in a 10-by-12 foot cabin without heat, electricity or running water. From this isolated location, he began the bombing campaign that would kill three people and injure more than 20 others.
The primary targets were universities, but he also placed a bomb on an American Airlines flight in 1979 and sent one to the home of the president of United Airlines in 1980. After federal investigators set up the UNABOM Task Force (the name came from the words “university and airline bombing”), the media dubbed the culprit the “Unabomber.” The bombs left little physical evidence, and the only eyewitness found in the case could describe the suspect only as a man in hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses (depicted in an infamous 1987 police sketch).
In 1995, the Washington Post (in collaboration with the New York Times) published a 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto written by a person claiming to be the Unabomber. Recognizing elements of his brother’s writings, David Kaczynski went to authorities with his suspicions, and Ted Kaczynski was arrested in April 1996. In his cabin, federal investigators found ample evidence linking him to the bombings, including bomb parts, journal entries and drafts of the manifesto.
Kaczynski was arraigned in Sacramento and charged with bombings in 1985, 1993 and 1995 that killed two people and maimed two others. (A bombing in New Jersey in 1994 also resulted in the victim’s death.) Despite his lawyers’ efforts, Kaczynski rejected an insanity plea. After attempting suicide in his jail cell in early 1998, Kaczynski appealed to U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. to allow him to represent himself, and agreed to undergo psychiatric evaluation. A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, and Judge Burrell ruled that Kaczynski could not defend himself. The psychiatrist’s verdict helped prosecutors and defense reach a plea bargain, which allowed prosecutors to avoid arguing for the death penalty for a mentally ill defendant.
On January 22, 1998, Kaczynski accepted a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole in return for a plea of guilty to all federal charges; he also gave up the right to appeal any rulings in the case. Though Kaczynski later attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, arguing that it had been involuntary, Judge Burrell denied the request, and a federal appeals court upheld the ruling. Kaczynski was remanded to a maximum-security prison in Colorado, where he is serving his life sentence.