There is little history to draw on which might help investigators working on the case of a potential serial bomber in Austin.
Similar events are rare.
“That means you don’t have a large sampling to establish a pattern, so there are very few things you can say with certainty,” said Jim Freeman, former FBI agent in charge of the San Francisco office.
Freeman coordinated the Unabomber investigation in the final two years before Ted Kaczynski was arrested in 1996.
“Those two years was a time when things started to accelerate rather quickly, not as quickly as the Austin case but there was definitely an evolution of the Unabomber’s targeting,” Freeman said.
“The Unabomber went for periods of three or even five years without activity, we later found out he was honing his bomb-making skills. His devices went from very rudimentary to sophisticated. In Austin, it appears you’re starting out with sophisticated devices.”
The hunt for the Unabomber took 18 years.
Freeman said he is certain things in Austin are unfolding much more rapidly than they did two decades ago. But frightened residents likely feel as if nothing is moving rapidly enough.
“You have to be helpful and ease people’s tensions because this is an active situation, but you also have to hold information back,” explained Aaron Wiley, a former federal prosecutor in North Texas.
Wiley said investigators likely know significantly more than they are revealing, because they don’t want to make public details that only the bomber would know. And, while the general public wants to know why this is happening, Wiley says prosecutors and investigators cannot be focused on motive right now.
“You have to follow the facts where they lead you,” Wiley said. “If you go in with a predisposition, you’re already looking for something. You need to have a clean slate. It’s more important to identify the characteristics of someone instead of thinking about motive, because motive could force you to eliminate an entire category of people that you don’t need to eliminate and you can miss things that are right in front of you.”
Freeman agreed.
“Profiles can be very helpful to an investigation but early on they can also give you false leads which are very common,” Freeman said. “What you don’t want to do is get distracted. You want to keep the profile in mind, but it needs to evolve as you develop additional evidence, hard evidence, about who the suspect might be or the type of individual.”
Wiley said, in his opinion, the person responsible likely has a high comfort level with explosives.
“You’ve got to have a level of expertise if you can do more than one without blowing yourself up,” he said. “And to do that many bombs in that short of period of time, in varying locations, and now with different methods of triggering, that is going to be a sophisticated person.”