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Mike Singh didn’t think twice about the wild-looking stranger who walked into the Burger King he managed at a Sacramento bus terminal in April 1995. The disheveled man with the matted mop of reddish-blond hair looked like all the other “bums” who came in in the mornings, Singh later told the Associated Press. The stranger, who ordered a breakfast sandwich, had several books tucked under his arm. He told Singh that he was doing research.
Singh would later see a photo of the man on television. His name, according to the news anchor, was Ted Kaczynski, and the FBI had just arrested him on suspicion of being the Unabomber, the serial-bombing bogeyman of the American imagination who had been terrorizing the country for nearly two decades.
But the day of the arrest was still roughly a year away on that morning at the Burger King; and before he was finally brought to justice, Kaczynski had one final, deadly surprise in store.