Unabomber Ted Kaczynski tormented FBI officers for 18 years
IN the end it was three words that identified Ted Kaczynski, “the most intellectual serial killer” America ever produced.
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AFTER 18 years of random terror, in the end it was three words that revealed the identity of “the most intellectual serial killer” America has ever produced, as one criminologist described Ted Kaczynski.
In 1995, Kaczynski insisted US newspapers publish a rambling, 35,000-word “manifesto” expounding the social damage caused by modern science and the industrial revolution.
As his younger brother David read the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, published in the Washington Post, he noted a phrase that insisted modern philosophers were not “cool-headed logicians”.
“Ted had once said I was not a ‘cool-headed logician’,” David later explained, “and I had never heard anyone else use that phrase.”
David’s tip-off ended what had become the FBI’s most expensive manhunt, beginning on May 25, 1978, when a Northwestern University professor was suspicious of a parcel returned to him by the postal service, although he had never mailed the item.
By then known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski was arrested on April 13, 1996. He was sentenced to life in prison 20 years ago, on May 4, 1998, in a Sacramento court. Although prosecutors wanted the death penalty, after two years of legal wrangling Kaczynski submitted to a psychiatric evaluation, when he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At age 55, he was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
At Northwestern in 1978, a security guard was the first of 23 victims injured by Kaczynski’s crude homemade bombs. The first had a 25cm-long metal pipe filled with explosive powder. The trigger was a nail held by rubber bands, intended to strike match heads when the wooden box was opened.
A Northwestern University graduate student escaped serious injury in May 1979 when he opened a cigar box that exploded. In this bomb a battery-operated filament wire ignited the explosives. In November 1979 a bomb triggered by an altimeter began to smoulder in the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight 444, but did not explode because it contained barium nitrate. Forced to land in Chicago, 18 people suffered smoke inhalation. In June 1980, the president of United Airlines opened a book he had received in the mail. He was injured when a bomb in its hollowed-out pages exploded. This bomb had a “signature”, the initials FC punched into the metal; authorities later learned this stood for Freedom Club.
The FBI coined the term UnAbom to refer to targets so far: universities and airlines bombings. The first fatality was on December 11, 1985, when Sacramento computer store owner Hugh Scrutton noticed a block of wood with nails in it in a parking lot. The bomb used three 27cm pipes filled with potassium sulfate, potassium chloride, ammonium nitrate, and aluminium powder, with chunks of metal, nails and splinters as shrapnel.
Advertising executive Thomas Mosser died when a package exploded in his family kitchen in New Jersey on December 10, 1994. In April 1995, the bomb that killed timber company lobbyist Gilbert Murray was addressed to someone else, the former president of the California Forestry Association.
The Kaczynski tragedy began on May 22, 1942, when Theodore John was born in Chicago, Illinois, to working-class Polish Americans Theodore and Wanda, who said he was a happy baby until left in hospital for a week at nine months old with severe hives, when his parents had limited visiting rights. After this, Wanda said, he “showed little emotion for months”. At primary school in Chicago he was described as “healthy” and “well-adjusted”. In 1952, three years after David was born, the family moved to suburban Evergreen Park, Illinois, where Ted skipped sixth grade after a test set his IQ at 167.
His parents doted on both sons, with Wanda reading to them and their father taking them on camping trips. Ted was remembered as more socially isolated after skipping a year at school.
Mathematically brilliant but shy and introverted, in 1958 he was accepted to Harvard College, where he was deceived into being part of a series of deliberately brutalising experiments. From late 1959 to early 1962, Harvard psychologists led by Henry Murray conducted disturbing experiments on 22 undergraduates. Kaczynski was identified as “Lawful”. Intended to measure how people react under stress, Murray subjected students to intensive interrogation, admitting to “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks on his subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.
Kaczynski completed a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1967, then joined the Berkeley Department of Mathematics as a teacher. In 1971 he moved to Montana, building a rudimentary cabin in forest near the town of Lincoln, on land he owned with David.
Increasingly reclusive, Kaczynski became estranged from his family. When arrested on April 3, 1996, his hair was matted, his beard wild and unkempt. Along with volumes by Shakespeare and Thackery, police found journals written in numeric code that described his weapons. From his prison cell in Florence, Colorado, Kaczynski continued writing, corresponding with thousands of penpals around the world.
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