The Unabomber Case: Ted Kaczynski's Capture

Sam Theodore Kaczynski, the man the press called the Unabomber, was a mathematician who gave up a university career, moved to a cabin in Montana, and began sending bombs through the mail. This part follows him from his birth in 1942 to June 1980, the point at which a bombing finally put the FBI on the case and gave it its name.

Sam Theodore John Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, to Wanda and Theodore Richard Kaczynski, Polish-American parents from a working-class family. Accounts differ on the birthplace. Some say Chicago, others Evergreen Park, the suburb where the family later lived. His brother David was born in 1949 or 1950. The family moved to Evergreen Park around 1952.

Sam Ted tested at a very high IQ and skipped grades. Classmates later described him as academically brilliant and socially isolated. He graduated from Evergreen Park Community High School at 15, was a National Merit finalist, and in 1958, at 16, entered Harvard on a scholarship. One classmate later said he had been sent there before he was ready, and did not even have a driver's license.

Sam At Harvard he first lived at 8 Prescott Street, housing for the youngest students, and then at Eliot House. Housemates described him as very intelligent and socially reserved. In his second year he joined a study led by the psychologist Henry Murray. Participants wrote essays on their beliefs, then faced attacks on those essays that Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive." Kaczynski spent about 200 hours in the study over roughly three years. His lawyers later tied some of his hostility toward psychological manipulation to it. He said he resented the invasion of privacy, but was "quite confident" it had no significant effect on the course of his life. Whether it shaped him remains contested.

Sam He took his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962. At the University of Michigan he earned a master's in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967, specializing in complex analysis. His dissertation, *Boundary Functions*, won the department's Sumner B. Myers Prize, and professors later called him among the best students they had seen.

Sam In late 1967, at 25, he became an acting assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, often described as the youngest assistant professor in the university's history. His student evaluations were poor. He seemed uncomfortable, taught from the book, and resisted questions. He resigned without explanation, effective June 30, 1969. The department chairman called the resignation "quite out of the blue" and said Kaczynski had seemed "almost pathologically shy."

Sam He went back to his parents in the Chicago area. Then, in 1971, he and David bought a small plot of land near Lincoln, Montana. There he built a one-room cabin, described as about 10 by 12 feet or 10 by 14, with no electricity and no running water. He lived there for most of the next quarter-century, reading, writing and doing odd jobs, with financial help from his family. He later said that Jacques Ellul's *The Technological Society* put into words what he already believed. From about 1975 he also sabotaged development near the cabin.

Sam In 1978 he returned to the Chicago area and briefly worked at a foam-cutting factory alongside his father and David. David later fired him. His stated aim, set out years afterward in a manuscript called *Industrial Society and Its Future*, was a revolution against industrial society. It opens: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." He argued that technology eroded freedom and damaged the natural world, and that violence was justified to force attention to that claim.

Sam The first bomb came on May 25, 1978, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A package was found in a parking lot, carrying a return address for Buckley Crist, an engineering professor at Northwestern University. Crist had not sent it. Campus security officer Terry Marker opened it, and it exploded, causing minor injuries. It was the first device later tied to Kaczynski.

Sam On May 9, 1979, a second device, left in a graduate-student area at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois, injured a graduate student, John Harris, with minor cuts and burns.

Sam Then, on November 15, 1979, a bomb in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., filled the cabin with smoke. The plane landed safely, and several passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. The device had not worked as designed. Investigators later said it could have destroyed the aircraft had it fully detonated. Because an airliner had been bombed, the FBI took the case.

Sam On June 10, 1980, Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines, was seriously injured at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois. A bomb had been hidden in a hollowed-out copy of Sloan Wilson's novel *Ice Brothers*, and it exploded as he opened it. He suffered extensive cuts and burns to his face, hand and leg. A letter signed with a fictitious name had told him that a book of "great social significance" was coming.

Sam The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service formed a task force. Its case name was UNABOM, short for university and airline bombing, and the press name "Unabomber" followed. The task force would eventually grow to more than 150 full-time investigators and analysts. The early devices were built from scrap and left little forensic trace, and some carried false clues. Many later bombs had the initials "FC" stamped inside. Kaczynski later said they stood for "Freedom Club." Investigators found no evidence that he had accomplices.

Sam Start in 1980, when the FBI's behavioral analyst John Douglas and colleagues drew up the first profile of the unknown bomber. They described a man of above-average intelligence with academic ties. A later refinement cast him as a neo-Luddite, someone opposed to industrial technology, with a hard-science degree. Investigators later concluded that victims were often chosen from library research rather than from personal grudges.

Sam In 1983 the task force set that psychological profile aside in favor of one built from the bomb fragments themselves. It pointed toward a blue-collar airplane mechanic.

Sam On October 8, 1981, a bomb was found in a hallway at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It was safely detonated, and no one was hurt.

Sam On May 5, 1982, a package addressed to Patrick Fischer, a computer-science professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, exploded when his secretary, Janet Smith, opened it. She was badly burned.

Sam On July 2, 1982, a bomb left in a break room in Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, injured engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos. His hand was maimed.

Sam Cory Hall was struck again on May 15, 1985. John Hauser, a graduate student and Air Force captain, was injured by a second bomb there. He lost fingers, suffered a severed artery, and lost part of the vision in one eye.

Sam On June 13 of that year, a package sent to Boeing's fabrication division in Auburn, Washington, was safely detonated. Most of the forensic evidence was lost with it.

Sam On November 15, at the University of Michigan, a bomb disguised as a thesis manuscript injured psychology professor James McConnell and a research assistant, Nicklaus Suino.

Sam Then came December 11, in Sacramento, California. Hugh Campbell Scrutton, 38, owned a computer store, RenTech Computer Rentals, in a shopping center. Behind the shop lay a device that looked like a piece of scrap lumber studded with nails. Scrutton moved it, and it exploded. The Sacramento Bee reported that he was mortally wounded shortly after noon and pronounced dead at 12:34 p.m. No one else was hurt, though shrapnel traveled a long distance.

Sam The Los Angeles Times, citing investigators, linked the killing to the earlier series and called it the first death. Until then the hunt had been largely quiet.

Sam The next attack came on February 20, 1987, in Salt Lake City. Gary Wright, then in his mid-twenties and associated with a computer firm called CAAMS, picked up what looked like debris in the parking lot behind a store on East 900 South. It exploded. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a man had been seriously injured. Wright later said the blast threw him about 22 feet and drove shrapnel through his body, leaving lasting nerve damage in his left arm.

Sam This time someone had been watching. A secretary looking out a window saw a slender man in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses place the device. Her sighting produced the composite sketch that became famous: a hood, a mustache, aviator sunglasses. The sketch circulated widely and led nowhere, and after the Salt Lake City bombing the attacks stopped for six years.

Sam The silence ended on June 22, 1993. In Tiburon, California, a package bomb exploded in the kitchen of the home of Charles Epstein, a geneticist who was a researcher at the University of California. Epstein lost fingers and suffered serious hearing damage and other injuries.

Sam Two days later, on June 24, a bomb that had been mailed to David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, reached him in New Haven, Connecticut. It cost him the use of his right hand and damaged one of his eyes and his hearing.

Sam The next victim died. On December 10, 1994, Thomas Mosser, a 50-year-old advertising executive, was in the kitchen of his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, when he opened a mail bomb. The New York Times reported the next day, citing the Essex County prosecutor, that his wife, his children and a neighbor's child were in other rooms of the house and were not hurt. Mosser had just been promoted to general manager at Young & Rubicam, after a long career at the public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller. The FBI linked the device to the series by the way it was built.

Sam One detail of the date needs settling. The FBI's own public timeline gives December 19 for Mosser's death. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times reports from the time, and the court record used at trial, put it on December 10, and that is the date used here. Years later Kaczynski wrote that he had chosen Mosser because of public-relations work he linked to Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. People who knew Mosser's career disputed whether that work was his.

Sam The last bomb came on April 24, 1995, in Sacramento. Gilbert Murray, 47, was the president of the California Forestry Association, and its office was a few blocks from the state capitol. A package arrived addressed to his predecessor, William Dennison, who had retired. Murray, a forester who lived in Roseville and had children, opened it, and it killed him. Five other employees in the office were not hurt. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both reported the next day that the FBI attributed the bombing to the same serial bomber.

Sam It was the sixteenth and last device. Across the whole series, the settled totals are three people killed and 23 injured.

Sam Letters from the writer who called himself FC reached the New York Times around the time of the Murray bombing. In them he wrote, "Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage," and, "The FBI is a joke."

Sam In late June 1995, the New York Times and The Washington Post each received a manuscript of roughly 35,000 words, with footnotes. Its title was *Industrial Society and Its Future*. The author made an offer. He would stop killing, though not necessarily stop attacking property, if one of the papers published the text in full within about three months, and if it printed his follow-up messages. Both papers turned the manuscript over to the FBI.

Sam Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh recommended publication. Their reason was public safety, and the hope that a reader would recognize the author. The decision was controversial inside the newspaper industry.

Sam Another offer came from Bob Guccione of Penthouse, who said he would publish the text. The author answered that Penthouse was less "respectable" than the two newspapers. He added that if only Penthouse ran it, he reserved the right to plant one more lethal bomb.

Sam On September 19, 1995, The Washington Post published the manuscript, unaltered, as an eight-page insert. The New York Times shared the decision and the cost. Arthur Sulzberger of the Times said, "Whether you like it or not, we're turning our pages over to a man who has murdered people. But I'm convinced we're making the right choice between bad options." Graham, of the Post, said, "Neither paper has any journalistic reason to print this."

Sam The next thread begins in the autumn of 1995, in the family of the man who had been writing letters from the Montana cabin. David Kaczynski's wife, Linda Patrik, was the first in the family to suspect Ted. She pressed David to read the published manifesto. He had not wanted to think it could be his brother, but he read it.

Sam He recognized things. There was phrasing he knew from Ted's letters, and arguments he had heard before. There were even misspellings that matched. One phrase he later cited to the FBI was "cool-headed logician." He also set the author's trail beside his brother's life: a Chicago upbringing, Berkeley, time in Salt Lake City, and then the cabin near Lincoln, Montana.

Sam David did not go straight to the authorities. He hired a private investigator, Susan Swanson, and then a Washington lawyer, Anthony Bisceglie. In early 1996, Bisceglie took the material to the FBI. David had made two requests. He asked that his own role stay secret, and he asked that his brother receive a psychiatric evaluation.

Sam The FBI then had writing to compare. David had provided letters from Ted and an old essay of his. Bureau analysts ran a linguistic analysis, a close comparison of word choice, phrasing and style. They concluded that the manifesto and Ted's writings were almost certainly by the same person.

Sam There was also biological evidence. A Washington Post report in June 1996, based on court documents, said that DNA from saliva on a letter Ted had sent to David was similar to DNA on a Unabomber letter. Put simply, the investigators had two lines of support: the way he wrote, and a genetic similarity between his saliva and a letter from the bomber. Together they supported a search warrant for the cabin. By the FBI's count, Ted was UNABOM suspect number 2,416.

Sam On April 3, 1996, agents arrested Theodore Kaczynski at the cabin near Lincoln, Montana. The FBI says the search turned up bomb components. It found about 40,000 handwritten journal pages describing experiments and crimes. It found a typed manuscript of the manifesto. And it found one live bomb, ready to mail.

Sam The government had hoped to keep the family connection quiet. It did not stay that way. CBS News reported the connection before the government wanted it public.

Sam The case that ended at that cabin door was the longest investigation in FBI history up to that point. By several official accounts it was also the most expensive. A federal commission report in 2000, cited in later summaries of the case, put the cost above $50 million.

Sam After the arrest came the indictment. Kaczynski was charged in federal court with transporting bombs and with murder, in counts arising from the fatal attacks in California and New Jersey and from other bombings. The government said it would seek the death penalty. The case was set for trial in Sacramento, before U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell Jr. The lead prosecutor was Robert Cleary. Kaczynski's court-appointed lawyers were Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke.

Sam From the start, the defense and the defendant disagreed. Denvir and Clarke wanted to put mental illness before the jury, in part to keep him from being executed. Kaczynski refused. He insisted he was sane, and that what he had done was a political campaign.

Sam The conflict broke open in January, while jury selection was underway. Kaczynski tried to dismiss his lawyers and act as his own attorney. Failing that, he wanted to hire Tony Serra, a lawyer who would argue the anti-technology case instead of insanity. Then, around January 7, he made an apparent suicide attempt in the Sacramento County jail.

Sam Judge Burrell ordered a competency examination, a court-ordered evaluation of whether a defendant can understand the proceedings and help his lawyers. It was carried out by Sally Johnson, a prison psychiatrist who had earlier examined John Hinckley Jr. She spent many hours with him. In a letter the court released, she wrote that "despite the psychiatric diagnosis described in the attached report," he was not incompetent to understand the proceedings or assist his lawyers. Both sides accepted that.

Sam The report itself stayed sealed. News organizations, citing lawyers who had read it, reported that the diagnosis included paranoid schizophrenia. Kaczynski rejected that label.

Sam Burrell then refused to let him change lawyers or delay the trial, and treated the request to represent himself as untimely. On January 22, the day opening statements were to begin, Kaczynski pleaded guilty in Sacramento to 13 federal counts of transporting and mailing explosive devices with intent to kill or maim. They covered the bombings, including the three murders. Asked how he pleaded, he said, "Guilty, Your Honor."

Sam In exchange, the government dropped the death penalty, and he gave up his right to appeal. Cleary told reporters, "The Unabomber's career is over." David and their mother, Wanda, were in the courtroom. David wept.

Sam Sentencing came on May 4. Judge Burrell imposed four consecutive life terms plus 30 years, with no possibility of release. The San Francisco Chronicle reported his words the next day: the defendant had committed "unspeakable and monstrous crimes for which he shows utterly no remorse." Survivors and relatives spoke. Kaczynski made a short statement, accusing the government of a political sentencing memo full of "false statements," one that cast him as a conscienceless killer rather than a revolutionary. Some later summaries say eight life sentences, but the contemporaneous account and the judgment described in court opinions say four, plus 30 years.

Sam The judgment also ordered restitution of $15,026,000 to named victims and families, and required him to turn over any proceeds from writings or interviews. A news account at the time of the plea had mentioned a lower figure, about $3.25 million, but the entered judgment is the larger one. He served most of his sentence at the federal Administrative Maximum prison in Florence, Colorado.

Sam In August, the government paid David Kaczynski the $1 million reward offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction. The Chicago Tribune reported that he said most of it would go to victims' families, with some used for the family's legal bills. He later created a fund for survivors with a large share of what remained after taxes and fees. David has said that turning his brother in was morally necessary and personally devastating.

Sam Meanwhile Ted tried for years to recover the papers seized from the cabin, saying he wanted to donate them to the University of Michigan. In 2005, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the government had to dispose of the property in a commercially reasonable way, to maximize the return to victims against the unpaid restitution. In 2011, an online auction sold journals, the typewriter, a handwritten manifesto, and the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. The U.S. Marshals Service told the San Francisco Chronicle it raised $232,246. Other outlets reported about $190,000. Either way, it was a small fraction of $15 million.

Sam Later, Kaczynski was diagnosed with cancer, and in December 2021 he was transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. On June 10, 2023, staff found him unresponsive in his cell shortly after midnight. The Bureau of Prisons said life-saving measures were begun and he was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was 81.

Sam The New York Times and the Associated Press, each citing people familiar with the matter, reported that he died by suicide. An autopsy report, described by NBC News, listed the cause as hanging with a shoelace, and noted late-stage rectal cancer that had spread. The North Carolina death certificate gives the manner as suicide, the immediate cause as hanging, and the time of pronouncement as 8:07 a.m. at Duke University Hospital in Durham.

Sam The case is closed. Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray are remembered by families who said in court that no sentence brought closure. Many of the 23 people injured lived with permanent disability. Gary Wright, who was hurt in Salt Lake City, later formed a public friendship with David Kaczynski built around forgiveness. That is Wright's account, and not a view shared by every survivor.

Sam Some things were never settled, because there was no trial. Kaczynski's journals and manifesto present a deliberate political campaign against industrial technology, carried out alone. The sealed evaluation described serious mental illness while still finding him competent, and he rejected that description. Some writers have treated the Harvard experiments as a cause; he denied they mattered. Whether publishing the manifesto was right is still argued. And the restitution of more than $15 million remains almost entirely unpaid.

Sam That's the story of Ted Kaczynski. One note on how it reached you: this show is AI-generated, the voice you are hearing is synthetic, and the facts come from the sources I'm about to name, whose authors are not affiliated with this show. The next episode of Notorious arrives next week.

Sam Everything today came from reporting by the FBI, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle through SFGate, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, A&E, the Sacramento Bee, the Salt Lake Tribune, NBC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, and Wikipedia.