FBI: `Unabomber' Killed Ad Exec -- Deadly Package Mailed From California

NEWARK, N.J. - The anarchist known as the "Unabomber" mailed the bomb that killed an advertising executive on Saturday, the FBI said today.

The FBI laboratory in Washington determined that the bomb had a return address and Dec. 3 postmark from San Francisco, said Jim Freeman, agent in charge in San Francisco.

"The postmark is still being reconstructed and evaluated," an FBI statement said.

Evidence links Saturday's killing of Young & Rubicam executive Thomas Mosser to 14 other explosions over 16 years, but the identity of the bomber and the reason Mosser was targeted remain a mystery.

Since 1978, the serial bomber has killed one other person and injured 23 more. The first bombs in the case - called "Unabom" because early bombings targeted universities (UN) and airlines (A) - were mailed in 1978. The last bombings linked to the "Unabom" suspect were 18 months ago.

Mosser, 50, was the first victim who didn't work at a university or in the computer or airline industries, the FBI said.

"The components of the bomb, its construction, make us believe the bombs are linked," FBI agent Barry Mawn said.

One clue linking the attacks is that most of the bombs had components, designed to survive the blasts, stamped with the initials "FC."

A letter to The New York Times last year, believed to be from the bomber, identified "FC" as an anarchist group.

Investigators have concluded that "FC" represents an obscene phrase denigrating computers, the Times reported today.

In the two weeks before the bomb was sent, computer giants Xerox Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp. hired Young & Rubicam. Mosser also had had numerous contacts with airlines and the airline industry, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported in today's editions.

Mawn, however, said he didn't know if Mosser's accounts had any links to the bomber's previous targets.

Young & Rubicam spokesman Richard McGowan said outside the company's New York headquarters today that there is "absolutely no suggestion that the incident . . . is related to Mr. Mosser's activities at Young & Rubicam or any of its clients."

The package arrived Friday at Mosser's home in North Caldwell, N.J., neatly wrapped, about the size of a videotape cassette and addressed to him.

When the FBI developed a profile of the bomber several years ago, it said the killer is probably a white man in his 30s or 40s with a high school education who has a grudge against high technology and takes great pride in building bombs.

Investigators believe he first lived in Chicago, then moved to Utah and California. A composite sketch was drawn after a witness reported seeing a man in a hooded sweatshirt and aviator glasses place a wooden box in the parking lot of a computer store in Salt Lake City in 1987.

The bombs have been constructed with hard-to-trace household items: nails, screws, towels, fishing line, glue, string, handmade switches, a barometer, metal, pipes, gunpowder and batteries.

The FBI is offering a $1 million reward for information in the bombings.

At least three of the other victims were featured in Times stories describing them as leaders in their high-technology fields, and a story on Mosser's promotion was published Dec. 5, the newspaper reported today.

But Freeman, at the news conference in San Francisco, said the bombing targets had each been mentioned in various publications and the FBI had not concluded that any publication had influenced the bomber's choices.

A task force led by the FBI has questioned hundreds of people in the earlier bombings, which include four in California, three in Illinois, two in Utah and one each in Connecticut, Michigan, Tennessee and Washington state. One caused injuries aboard a plane flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C.

Geneticist Charles Epstein of the University of California at San Francisco lost several fingers after a package exploded on June 22, 1993. Two days later, computer scientist David Gelernter was severely injured opening a package at his Yale University office.

The only other death linked to "Unabom" occurred Dec. 11, 1985, when Hugh Scrutton picked up what appeared to be a block of wood near his Sacramento, Calif., computer rental store and it exploded.

John Hauser was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley working alone in an engineering laboratory on May 15, 1985, when he noticed what appeared to be a black notebook inside a plastic container. Opening the container out of curiosity set off an explosion that obliterated part of his right hand and ended Hauser's career as an Air Force fighter pilot.

On May 18, 1985, police disarmed a bomb mailed to The Boeing Co. in Auburn, Wash.