Ted Kaczynski

• 1. Introduction

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  Ted Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times in 1995 and attached a promise to it. If the Times or The Washington Post printed his essay in full, he would "desist from terrorism." The essay ran to roughly 35,000 words and carried the title Industrial Society and Its Future. Its author is better known by a name he never chose, the Unabomber, which the press gave him before anyone knew who he was. Theodore John Kaczynski was also a trained mathematician, and he lived apart from nearly everyone. Why would a person with that gift walk away from it? What did the essay actually argue? And what did investigators finally notice that years of bomb fragments could not tell them? The answers run through a Chicago childhood, a Montana cabin, and a long string of mail bombs.

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• 2. The Boy Prodigy

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  Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on the 22nd of May 1942. His parents, Wanda Theresa and Theodore Richard Kaczynski, were working-class Polish Americans, and his father made sausages. Both had been raised as Roman Catholics and later became atheists. They had married on the 11th of April 1939. Ted spent first through fourth grade at Sherman Elementary School in Chicago, where administrators described him as healthy and well-adjusted.

  In 1952, three years after the birth of his brother David, the family moved to suburban Evergreen Park, Illinois. Testing there put Ted's IQ at 167, and he skipped the sixth grade. He later called that a pivotal event. Until then he had mixed easily with classmates and was even seen as a leader. Among the older children he felt he did not fit, and they bullied him. Neighbors later called the family "civic-minded folks," and one said the parents "sacrificed everything they had for their children." Both boys were intelligent, but neighbors remembered Ted as smart and lonely.

  At Evergreen Park Community High School, Ted played trombone in the marching band and joined the mathematics, biology, coin, and German clubs. He fell in with a group of boys who loved science and mathematics and carried briefcases, which earned them the nickname the "briefcase boys." In 1996, a former classmate said: "He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality... He was always regarded as a walking brain, so to speak."

  Placed in an advanced mathematics class, he mastered the material quickly. He skipped the eleventh grade and, with summer school, graduated at age 15. He was one of five National Merit finalists at his school, and he was encouraged to apply to Harvard University. Harvard accepted him while he was still 15, and he arrived on a scholarship in 1958 at age 16. A classmate later remarked: "They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready... He didn't even have a driver's license."

  His first-year home at Harvard was 8 Prescott Street, a residence meant to give the youngest and most precocious arrivals a small, intimate setting. For the next three years he lived at Eliot House. Housemates described him as very intelligent and socially reserved. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1962, with a GPA of 3.12.

  In his second year, Kaczynski joined a study led by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student, and they first wrote essays on their beliefs and aspirations. An anonymous person then used those essays as ammunition to confront and belittle each subject. Murray himself described the attacks as "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive." Kaczynski spent 200 hours in the study. He said he resented Murray and his colleagues for the invasion of privacy he perceived. Yet he also said he was "quite confident that his experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of his life." Decades later, his lawyers traced his hostility toward mind control techniques to those sessions.

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• 3. A Mathematician's Rise

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  George Piranian, one of his professors at the University of Michigan, put it plainly: "It is not enough to say he was smart." Kaczynski enrolled at Michigan in 1962 and earned his Master of Arts in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1967. It was not his first choice. The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago had both accepted him, but neither offered a teaching position or financial aid. Michigan offered an annual grant of $2,310 and a teaching post.

  He specialized in complex analysis, specifically geometric function theory. Professor Peter Duren said Kaczynski was not like the other graduate students, with a drive to discover mathematical truth. Piranian recalled that when a problem was hard, Kaczynski simply worked harder. Professor Allen Shields wrote in a grade evaluation that he was the "best man I have seen." Across eighteen courses, Kaczynski collected twelve A's, five B's and one F. Looking back in 2006, he said he had unpleasant memories of Michigan and thought its grading standards were low.

  For several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski was gripped by intense fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged an appointment with a psychiatrist, then changed his mind in the waiting room and talked about other things. Afterward, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and others he hated. He called the episode a "major turning point" and wrote: "Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."

  In 1967 his dissertation, Boundary Functions, won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for the best mathematics dissertation at Michigan that year. Shields, his advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed." Committee member Maxwell Reade guessed that "maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it." In late 1967, the 25-year-old Kaczynski became an acting assistant professor at Berkeley, the youngest in the history of the university. By September 1968 he held a formal assistant professorship, a sign that tenure lay ahead.

  Students did not warm to him. Teaching evaluations suggested he seemed uncomfortable in the classroom, taught straight from the textbook, and refused to answer questions. On the 30th of June 1969, he resigned without any explanation. In a 1970 letter to Shields, department chairman John W. Addison Jr. called the resignation "quite out of the blue." Addison added that Kaczynski "seemed almost pathologically shy" and had made no close friends in the department.

  In 1996, reporters for the Los Angeles Times asked mathematicians about his field and concluded that his subfield had effectively ceased to exist after the 1960s, because most of its conjectures had been proven. Mathematician Donald Rung said that had Kaczynski stayed, he "probably would have gone on to some other area."

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• 4. The Montana Cabin

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  After leaving Berkeley, Kaczynski first moved into his parents' home in Lombard, Illinois. In 1971 he settled in a cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana. It had no electricity and no running water. He worked odd jobs and received significant financial support from his family. His original goal was self-sufficiency, so he could live autonomously on very little money.

  He rode an old bicycle into town. A library volunteer recalled that he came often to read classic works in their original languages. Other Lincoln residents later said his way of life was typical for the area. A census taker in 1990 described the cabin as holding a bed, two chairs, storage trunks, a gas stove, and lots of books.

  In 1975, Kaczynski began sabotaging developments near his cabin, including arson and booby traps. He also read sociology and political philosophy, among it the work of Jacques Ellul. His brother David said Ellul's The Technological Society "became Ted's Bible." Kaczynski recalled in 1998 that on first reading it, he was delighted to find someone saying what he had already been thinking.

  After his arrest, he described a favorite wild place, a plateau about two days' hike from his cabin, cut by steep ravines and a waterfall. In the summer of 1983 he returned there and found a road running through its middle. He said he was deeply upset. From then on, he said, rather than gaining more wilderness skills, he would work on getting back at the system, and he named the motive plainly: "Revenge."

  Neighbors suspected him of attacking and poisoning their dogs on several occasions during the 1980s and 1990s. The FBI later found poisons in his cabin, and in later letters he admitted killing at least one dog.

  His father visited Montana more than once and was impressed by Ted's wilderness skills. In 1990 his father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and held a family meeting without Ted to plan for the future. On the 2nd of October 1990, his father died by suicide at home.

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• 5. Sixteen Bombs

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  On the 25th of May 1978, a package bearing the return address of Buckley Crist, a materials engineering professor at Northwestern University, turned up in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was sent back to Crist, who grew suspicious because he had not mailed it, and he called campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package. It exploded and caused minor injuries.

  Sixteen bombs were attributed to Kaczynski between 1978 and 1995. Together they killed three people and injured 23. Many bore the initials "FC," which he later said stood for "Freedom Club." He planted misleading clues and took great care to avoid fingerprints. Prints found on some devices did not match those on letters attributed to him.

  Kaczynski had come back to Chicago for the first attack and stayed for a time to work with his father and brother at a foam rubber factory. In August 1978, David fired him for writing insulting limericks about a female supervisor Ted had briefly courted. She recalled him as intelligent and quiet and firmly denied any romance. His second bomb came nearly a year after the first, again to Northwestern. It was hidden in a cigar box left on a table, and it injured graduate student John Harris.

  In 1979, a bomb rode in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. It released smoke, and the pilots made an emergency landing. Authorities said it had power enough to "obliterate the plane." The device used a barometer trigger and only set some mailbags on fire. Years later, Kaczynski wrote that he was relieved it had failed, because that target was too indiscriminate. His next bomb went to Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines, who suffered cuts and burns over most of his body.

  Kaczynski hid false clues in most bombs and made them hard to find so they would look authentic. Metal plates stamped "FC" were tucked away, usually in the pipe end cap. One unexploded bomb held a note addressed to someone named Wu, saying it works, signed RV. Many boxes carried Eugene O'Neill one-dollar stamps. One bomb was embedded in a copy of Sloan Wilson's novel Ice Brothers.

  The FBI came to believe his crimes had a theme of nature, trees, and wood. He often included bits of branch and bark, and his targets included Percy Wood and LeRoy Wood Bearnson. In 1981 a package with Bearnson's return address was found in a hallway at the University of Utah, and a bomb squad defused it. Crime writer Robert Graysmith called the bomber's "obsession with wood" a large factor.

  In May 1982, a bomb sent to Vanderbilt University computer science professor Patrick C. Fischer exploded when his secretary, Janet Smith, opened it. That July, a bomb seriously injured Berkeley engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos. In May 1985, Air Force captain and graduate student John Hauser lost four fingers and the vision in one eye to a bomb built from wooden parts. A bomb sent to the Boeing Company in Auburn, Washington, was defused. In November 1985, professor James V. McConnell and research assistant Nicklaus Suino were both severely injured.

  In late 1985, a nail-and-splinter bomb in the parking lot of a Sacramento computer store killed its 38-year-old owner, Hugh Scrutton. On the 20th of February 1987, a bomb disguised as a piece of lumber injured Gary Wright outside a computer store in Salt Lake City. Wright's left arm nerves were severed, and at least 200 pieces of shrapnel entered his body. Someone saw the bomber planting it, which produced the widely circulated sketch of a hooded man with a mustache and aviator sunglasses.

  After a six-year break, a 1993 bomb reached the home of Charles Epstein of the University of California, San Francisco, who lost several fingers. The same weekend, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter lost sight in one eye, hearing in one ear, and part of his right hand. In 1994, advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed at his New Jersey home. Kaczynski told The New York Times he chose Mosser because of his work repairing Exxon's image after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

  In 1995, a bomb killed Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the California Forestry Association. It had been addressed to his retired predecessor, William Dennison. Shortly afterward, MIT geneticist Phillip Sharp received a threatening letter.

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• 6. The Manifesto

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  "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." So begins Industrial Society and Its Future. In 1995 Kaczynski mailed letters to several media outlets, outlining his goals and demanding that a major newspaper print the essay verbatim. He typed it, using capital letters for emphasis in place of italics. He called himself "we" or "FC," though no evidence shows he worked with anyone.

  The FBI nicknamed the work the "Unabomber manifesto," and there was debate over whether to print it. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh recommended publication, citing public safety and the hope that a reader might identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse offered to print it. Kaczynski answered that Penthouse was less "respectable" than the Times or the Post. If Penthouse ran it instead, he warned, he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill." The Washington Post published the essay on the 19th of September 1995.

  Kaczynski argued that technology made life unfulfilling and caused widespread psychological suffering. In his words, the system "requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved." People cope, he said, through "surrogate activities," pursuing artificial goals such as scientific work, entertainment, political activism, or following sports teams. He tied these to what he called the "power process," the human drive for independence and power over one's own life.

  He predicted forms of control such as genetic engineering, with people adjusted to fit social systems rather than the reverse. With artificial superintelligence, he wrote, the mass of the population would become a "useless burden on the system." The elite might keep them in genetically manipulated subservience or eliminate them. Reform was impossible, he said, because the system must closely regulate behavior. He expected the question to be settled within 40 to 100 years, and he held that revolution would only become possible once industrial society grew unstable.

  A large part of the essay targets leftism, which he saw as both a symptom of technological pressures and an obstacle to an effective revolution. He listed socialists, feminists, and animal rights activists among leftists and called leftism "one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world." Conservatives fared no better. He called them "fools" who "whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth."

  In a 1998 New York Times op-ed, James Q. Wilson wrote that if the essay was a madman's work, then the writings of Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Karl Marx were scarcely more sane. Alston Chase, a fellow Harvard alumnus, wrote in The Atlantic in 2000 that the disturbing thing about Kaczynski was not how foreign his ideas were but how familiar. He argued that people needed to see him as exceptional, as madman or genius, because the alternative was far more frightening.

  Kaczynski kept writing. His 2010 anthology Technological Slavery, introduced by philosophy professor David Skrbina, gathers the original manifesto, letters to Skrbina, and other essays. New editions followed in 2019 and 2022. In 2016 he published Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, which omits the manifesto and examines why technological society cannot be reformed. His critique of civilization resembled anarcho-primitivism, but he rejected that movement. Ecofascists have embraced him, yet he called ecofascism "an aberrant branch of leftism" and wrote that the true anti-tech movement rejects racism and ethnocentrism, since racial division would drive the competition that feeds technological growth.

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• 7. The Hunt and the Arrest

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  Postal inspectors, who first held the case, nicknamed the suspect the "Junkyard Bomber" because of the scrap-like materials in his bombs. The FBI named its investigation UNABOM, short for University and Airline Bombing, and put Inspector Terry D. Turchie in charge. In 1979 a task force formed with 125 agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. It grew to more than 150 full-time staff. Minute study of bomb parts and the victims' lives helped little, since the bombs used scrap available almost anywhere. Investigators later learned the victims were picked indiscriminately from library research.

  In 1980, chief agent John Douglas and the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit issued a psychological profile of an unknown bomber with above-average intelligence and ties to academia. It was later sharpened to a neo-Luddite with a hard-science degree, then discarded in 1983. Analysts turned to the physical evidence and sketched a rival suspect, a blue-collar airplane mechanic. A toll-free hotline took calls, backed by a $1 million reward. In 1993, investigators also hunted someone named "Nathan," because that name was imprinted on an envelope sent to the media.

  David Kaczynski's wife urged him to follow up on suspicions about Ted. FBI press conferences had convinced them the bomber came from the Chicago area, had a Salt Lake City connection, and later had links to the San Francisco Bay Area. David was dismissive at first. A week after the essay appeared, he read it and took the likelihood more seriously. He found letters from the 1970s in which Ted protested technology's abuses in phrasing like the essay's.

  David hired a Chicago private investigator, Susan Swanson, to look into Ted quietly. Then he hired Washington attorney Tony Bisceglie to organize the evidence and approach the FBI. The family feared a violent raid like those at Ruby Ridge or Waco. Former FBI profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt compared the essay to typed copies of Ted's letters and found better than a 60 percent chance of the same author. A second team found a higher likelihood, and he urged contacting the FBI immediately.

  In February 1996, Bisceglie gave Molly Flynn at the FBI a copy of an essay Ted wrote in 1971. FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald saw the similarities through linguistic analysis and judged the author almost certainly the same. That analysis supported Turchie's affidavit for a search warrant. David had hoped to stay anonymous, but his identity leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. Anchor Dan Rather called Freeh, who asked for 24 hours before the story aired. The leak was never traced. The warrant itself noted that several experts thought someone else wrote the essay.

  On the 3rd of April 1996, agents arrested an unkempt Kaczynski at his cabin. They found bomb components, improvised firearms, and one live bomb. They also found 40,000 handwritten journal pages describing bomb experiments and the crimes, along with what appeared to be the original typed manuscript of the essay. A 2000 federal report said the task force had spent over $50 million.

  After his capture, some suggested he was the Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in Northern California in 1968 and 1969. Kaczynski had lived in the Bay Area from 1967 to 1969, and both men were intelligent, interested in bombs and codes, and wrote to newspapers demanding publication. His whereabouts could not be verified for every killing, but the Zodiac's guns and knives differed from his bombs. Authorities did not pursue him, and Robert Graysmith called the similarities "fascinating" but coincidental.

  His journals ran from about 1969 until his arrest. Some entries were plain text and others were enciphered. A plain 1979 entry bragged of sabotage such as adding sugar to fuel tanks and setting traps for motorcyclists. Encrypted entries recorded his bombings and numbered his experiments. "Experiment 97" killed Hugh Scrutton in 1985, and "Experiment 244" killed Thomas Mosser in 1994. A 1971 entry read: "My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge."

  He built two ciphers, Code #I and Code #II. Code #I used a 54x42 grid to generate a long key, decoded with modulo 90 addition and a "List of Meanings." Code #II was a one-time pad that needed two notebooks and modulo 100 subtraction. Both were built for personal use, with deliberate errors, German words, and random punctuation to confuse decoders. The FBI found the keys, grids, notebooks, and instructions in the cabin, and cryptanalyst Michael Birch decoded the journals.

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• 8. Plea, Prison, and Afterlife

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  On the 8th of January 1998, Kaczynski asked to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers and hire Tony Serra instead. A federal grand jury had indicted him in June 1996 on ten counts of transporting, mailing, and using bombs. His lawyers, led by Michael Donahoe and Judy Clarke, wanted an insanity defense to avoid the death penalty. He refused, and Serra had agreed to build a defense on Kaczynski's anti-technology views instead. The request failed, and Kaczynski tried to kill himself on the 9th of January.

  Psychiatrist Sally Johnson concluded he suffered from "paranoid" schizophrenia, though critics have questioned that diagnosis. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz said he was not psychotic but had a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder. In Technological Slavery, Kaczynski wrote that two prison psychologists who saw him for four years found no sign of schizophrenia and called the diagnosis "ridiculous." Some authors suggest that his brother and mother spread the image of mental illness to save his life. Johnson declared him competent on the 21st of January 1998. The next day, he pleaded guilty to all charges and accepted life without parole. He later tried to withdraw the plea, but Judge Garland Ellis Burrell Jr. refused, and the Ninth Circuit upheld that ruling.

  Kaczynski served his sentences at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado. There he befriended Ramzi Yousef and Timothy McVeigh, the men behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The friendship with McVeigh lasted until McVeigh's execution in 2001. Kaczynski said he liked McVeigh personally but judged the Oklahoma City bombing "unnecessarily inhumane." In 2012 he answered the Harvard class of 1962 directory inquiry for its fiftieth reunion, listing his occupation as "prisoner" and eight life sentences as "awards."

  In 2006, Judge Burrell ordered his cabin contents and papers sold at an online auction, excluding bomb-making materials, with proceeds going toward $15 million in victim restitution. References to victims were removed from the papers, and Kaczynski unsuccessfully challenged that as a free speech violation. The two-week auction in 2011 raised over $232,000. He had given the cabin itself to Scharlette Holdman, an anti-death penalty activist who helped keep him from a death sentence, but the government would not let her keep it. It was displayed at the Newseum in Washington until late 2019, then moved to an FBI museum.

  In March 2021, Kaczynski was diagnosed with rectal cancer, and on the 14th of December 2021 he was moved to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina. He had biweekly chemotherapy until March 2023, when he refused further treatment. At 12:23 a.m. on the 10th of June 2023, he was found unresponsive in his cell after hanging himself. He was pronounced dead at Duke University Hospital at 8:07 a.m.

  The Unabomber name outlived him in popular culture. Works include the 1996 film Unabomber: The True Story, the 2017 series Manhunt with Paul Bettany, and the 2021 film Ted K with Sharlto Copley. The label was also applied to an Italian Unabomber who attacked from 1994 to 2006, and an Austrian one who killed 4 people. Futurist Ray Kurzweil quoted the manifesto in The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1999. In a 2000 Wired article, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy said Kaczynski is clearly a Luddite but that saying so does not dismiss his argument. Anders Behring Breivik, the 2011 Norway attacker, copied large parts of the essay into his own manifesto with some terms swapped.

  Since the 2017 Manhunt series, an online community of primitivists and neo-Luddites has grown around his views. Merrick Garland later cited the Unabomber case among the most important he worked on. At the University of Michigan, the Labadie Collection holds Kaczynski's correspondence with more than 400 people since his arrest, and the identities of most correspondents will remain sealed until 2049.

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