DEAR DIARY, I MADE BOMBS

Theodore Kaczynski's lawyers are still burrowing through the 1,400 lbs. of records the government gathered during the 18 years it spent hunting for the Unabomber. "This case is the largest, the biggest, the most complex case ever filed in this district," federal defender Quin Denvir told U.S. District Court Judge Garland Burrell Jr. at a pretrial hearing last Friday. But prosecutors made it clear they had found what they were looking for--proof that they had the man responsible for killing three people and injuring 23 others in 16 bombings around the country. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Cleary said that in the journals they found in Kaczynski's Montana cabin, he admitted his role in all 16 crimes, with inscriptions such as "I mailed that bomb" and "I sent that bomb."

"These documents are the backbone of the government's case," Cleary said. Other entries detailed the outcome of bombings and expressed the Unabomber's "desire to kill," Cleary said. He then began to describe how Kaczynski's typewriter had been linked to the Unabomber's correspondence and bombs, but the judge said there was no need to say more. Denvir protested that publicizing the diaries will make it harder to find impartial jurors and said the defense would be challenging their admissibility. The case in California involves only four of the bombings: the deaths of a computer-rental-store owner in Sacramento in 1985 and a timber-industry lobbyist in Sacramento in 1995, and the maiming of a University of California geneticist and a Yale University computer expert in 1993.

The judge has not yet set a date for the trial to begin. Attorney General Janet Reno has not decided whether to seek the death penalty--something Kaczynski's family, which led investigators to his remote cabin, strongly opposes. In an interview two weeks ago on 60 Minutes, the defendant's mother Wanda Kaczynski argued for mercy: "There are people in this world that are mentally ill," she said, "and are we going to start killing them? What kind of a barbaric society are we heading for?" The California-based prosecution team is expected to file its own recommendations within a week.