SUSPECT'S PATH JIBES WITH UNABOMBER'S.

Byline: Richard Perez-Pena The New York Times

On May 25, 1978, a package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois' campus in downtown Chicago. The return address bore the name of a scientist at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, and the parcel was forwarded to him. But he did not recognize it, so he alerted campus security guards, who opened it. It exploded.

Just about that time, Theodore Kaczynski, who had lived for years in seclusion in Montana, moved back for a while to the Chicago area, where he had grown up.

That convergence is the most striking of several between the life of Kaczynski, a brilliant, withdrawn former assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Unabomber, who baffled law-enforcement agencies around the country for 18 years, beginning with that bomb in the parking lot.

This week federal agents arrested Kaczynski at his shack in Montana, in the belief that he and the bomber are the same man.

On Saturday investigators trying to connect Kaczynski to the bombings determined, as they had suspected, that he had frequently ridden intercity buses, which would have allowed him to travel from Montana to both Utah and Northern California, where the bomber had been active since 1981.

To be sure, federal investigators still have work to do before they can claim to have connected Kaczynski's life closely to what is known or believed about the person who mailed or placed 16 bombs from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others.

But no contradictions have emerged, and there are some powerful links, like Kaczynski's connections to the Chicago area, to Salt Lake City and to the San Francisco Bay area, all places strongly associated with the bomber.

Also potentially telling are the profiles of the bomber, compiled by the FBI and social scientists, which in retrospect can be seen to have resembled Kaczynski ever more strongly as clues were gathered over the years. From the outset, the bomber was thought to be an intelligent, meticulous loner who grew up in the Chicago area, a description that fits Kaczynski.

Although the first profile suggested that his formal education might have been limited, later ones said he most likely had a postgraduate education, which Kaczynski does. According to early versions, the bomber would now be in his mid-40s, but more recently investigators thought he was in his 50s; Kaczynski is 53.

``He fits the profile perfectly,'' said Louis Bertram, an FBI agent in Salt Lake City who spent several years on the search for the Unabomber before retiring in 1988.

Kaczynski was reared in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., and graduated from high school in three years, at the age of 16, in 1958.

He graduated from Harvard in 1962 and entered the graduate program in mathematics at the University of Michigan, earning a master's in 1964 and a doctorate in 1967. He was an acting assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley from 1967 to 1969.

In the early 1970s he built a tiny cabin in Montana, where he lived in almost total isolation.

But on July 7, 1978, six weeks after the first attack attributed to the Unabomber, Kaczynski received an Illinois driver's license, using his parents' address in the Chicago suburb of Lombard. Neighbors recall the return of the reclusive son, by then 36 years old, and some say he worked odd jobs.

``He never said a word to anyone that I remember,'' said Roy Froberg, who lives across the street.

Kaczynski's younger brother, David, also lived with their parents about the same time, according to neighbors and driver's license records, after spending a few years in Lisbon, Iowa, where the parents had lived for two years in the 1960s.

Linda Patrik, whom David had known since high school and would later marry, received a doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern in May 1978, the month of the first explosion. Whether she served to draw Theodore Kaczynski's attention to the university is unclear.

The second bomb was left on the Northwestern campus a year later and, like the first, did not seriously hurt anyone. The third, mailed from Chicago, exploded in November 1979 aboard an American Airlines plane carrying mail to Washington, and injured 12 passengers.

The fourth, also mailed from Chicago, exploded in June 1980 at the Lake Forest, Ill., home of Percy Wood, president of United Airlines, who was injured.

Federal agents say Theodore Kaczynski lived in Salt Lake City for a while in the early 1980s - though city and state agencies there say they have no record of him - and the bomber's activities shifted there then.

A bomb was planted at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in October 1981, and another was mailed from nearby Provo to a Vanderbilt University computer scientist in May 1982. Two more bombs were tied to Salt Lake City: one mailed from there in 1985 to a University of Michigan psychologist, and one left at a computer store in 1987.

But since mid-1982 the Unabomber has been active mostly in Northern California, and although Kaczynski lived in the region in the late 1960s, there is no indication that federal agents have been able to place him there more recently.

Eight of the bomber's explosives were placed or mailed in Berkeley or Sacramento, and letters he sent to The New York Times also were mailed there.

That concentration led to the most glaring error in the FBI's profiles, if Kaczynski is indeed the bomber. The bureau had guessed that the bomber lived in Northern California, but by the accounts of Kaczynski's neighbors in Montana, he has lived there steadily for many years.

It appears, however, that he traveled extensively. A small bus company, Rimrock Stages, provides service from Lincoln, Mont., the town near Kaczynski's home, directly to Helena, the state capital, and Missoula. From Helena, a Rimrock bus leaves each day for Butte, and from there it is possible to make Greyhound bus connections to most of the country.

On Saturday, Stacie Fredrickson, a ticket agent in Butte, said she had seen Kaczynski ``about 15 times since 1991 riding Greyhound buses,'' either through Butte on the route to Salt Lake City or from Butte to Missoula, where connections can be made to the West Coast.

Helena and Missoula also have airports with regular airline service, although the bomber's demonstrated antipathy for airlines makes that an unlikely mode of travel for him.

The owner of an inexpensive hotel in Helena says that for nearly 15 years, Kaczynski has been an occasional guest, four times in the last year alone. He would have had to stay overnight to catch the daily morning bus to Butte or to make many of the available air connections.

Federal agents have examined the hotel's records and interviewed bus and airport workers, trying to link Kaczynski's trips outside Lincoln to the bomber's activities.

The most persistent mystery remains the bomber's selection of targets, aside from their connections to advanced technology or their unpopularity among environmentalists. Little in Kaczynski's life suggests direct links to any of them, other than his tie to Berkeley, where bombs were planted in 1982 and 1985.

Indeed, from the first target, Buckley Crist, the material sciences professor at Northwestern whose name was on that first package in 1978, to the most recent of the Unabomber's victims, Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, who was killed last spring, all seem to have been chosen with a studied randomness.

Eighteen years later, the capture of Kaczynski makes it no clearer to Crist why he was chosen, but he takes some solace in the thought that his waiting may be over. He is, he said, ``genuinely pleased that the FBI got this guy.''

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Photo: Theodore Kaczynski

Neighbors call him quiet recluse