Unabomber case

DATE: Bombings took place between May 1978 and April 1995

THE EVENT: Unabomber was the name given to the unknown perpetrator of a series of bombings in the United States that targeted primarily victims associated with universities and airlines. Many of the explosive devices were sent through the US mail.

SIGNIFICANCE: The Unabomber case brought ecoterrorism to the attention of American law-enforcement agencies and led to one of the largest manhunts in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, carried out one of the longest single-handed strings of bombings in the history of terrorism. From 1978 to 1995, he delivered at least sixteen bombs to targets, some through the US mail and others through hand delivery. In a little less than seventeen years, Kaczynski killed three people and wounded twenty-three, succeeding in inserting terror into the psyches of many Americans. At the end of his reign of terror, the New York Times and the Washington Post published a long essay written by Kaczynski in exchange for a halt to the bombings. Kaczynski was captured the next year and eventually pleaded guilty in 1998 to federal charges related to the bombings. He received a sentence of four life terms, escaping the death penalty that federal prosecutors originally sought.

Kaczynski’s Early Life

Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago, and in his childhood, educators at Evergreen Park Central School deemed him a gifted student. It has been reported that he scored 157 on an IQ test when he was ten years old. He was allowed to skip the sixth grade and to take classes with older students. In his journal, Kaczynski stated that being placed into classes with older children caused considerable difficulty in his life; he was verbally taunted and found that he was unable to fit in socially.

Kaczynski attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High School. Although he excelled academically, he continued to struggle socially, feeling isolated from other students. He briefly experienced some social fame in high school when he constructed a pipe bomb in one of his science classes, but he generally remained a loner throughout his high school career. His isolation was exacerbated when he was allowed to skip the eleventh grade and graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. Kaczynski was then accepted into Harvard University and began classes there in 1958 at the age of sixteen.

Kaczynski struggled in social relationships throughout college and felt particularly uncomfortable interacting with women. He again excelled in academics, however, and graduated in 1962. He then moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received both a master’s degree and a PhD in mathematics. Some of his professors there later described him as ambitious, talented, and gifted. While in graduate school, he also taught undergraduate classes and published a number of articles. It has been reported that Kaczynski had confusion about his gender during graduate school, experiencing fantasies of being a female, and that he contemplated a sex change at this time. Instead of addressing that issue, however, he sought psychiatric help for anxiety.

Kaczynski took a job as assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, but he did not relate well to his students. Despite attempts by administrators to persuade him otherwise, he resigned from his position in 1969, and his professional life began to spiral downward in conjunction with his social life. After his resignation, Kaczynski returned to Illinois and lived in a small house owned by his parents. He was largely unemployed during this period, working random jobs and borrowing money from his parents to get by.

In the 1970s, Kaczynski lived as a hermit, interacting with only a few people and slipping deeper into social isolation and anger, which he directed against the technological advancement of society. His relationships with family members became increasingly odd, as he accused them of emotional abuse and persistently sought apologies. Some psychologists who have reviewed Kaczynski’s life believe that he was showing signs of schizophrenia.

Kaczynski began writing about the evils of technology, including its control over individuals. He also began planning to kill people in an apparent attempt to make a statement about the evils of technology. In 1978, at the same time he was starting to put his desire to commit into motion, Kaczynski was working with his brother and father at a foam-rubber factory.

Bombings and Investigation

The first bomb that Kaczynski aimed at another person was placed in a package left at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1978; the package carried the return address of Professor Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. The package was found and sent back to the professor, who was suspicious of receiving a returned package that he had never mailed. A campus officer at the university, Terry Marker, then opened the package and it detonated, causing Marker minor injuries.

Kaczynski followed this initial attack with attempted bombings of airlines in 1979. He sent several bombs in the mail to airline officials and placed a bomb in the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, DC. That bomb did not explode because of a defective timer, but it did begin to smoke while the flight was in the air, causing the pilot to undertake an emergency landing. Officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated afterward that the bomb was easily strong enough to bring down the airplane. Although the FBI initially thought that the attempted airline bombings might be the work of a disgruntled airline employee, the psychological profile of the Unabomber (the term comes from the FBI’s designation of the case as UNABOM, for “university and airline bomber”) pointed to an intelligent man who was possibly an academic.

Kaczynski continued his bombings in the early to mid-1980s, and his desire to cause serious harm to others became a reality. In 1985, one of his bombs caused John Hauser, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the US Air Force, to lose several fingers and the vision in one eye. Kaczynski then targeted two computer stores, one in 1985 and one in 1987. Computer store owner Hugh Scrutton became the first person to die in one of the Unabomber’s attacks on December 11, 1985.

For unknown reasons, Kaczynski took a six-year hiatus from his bombings before launching new attacks in 1993. That year, one of his devices seriously injured David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University, and another caused Charles Epstein, a geneticist, to lose fingers. He continued his attacks in 1994 and 1995; his bombs killed advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser, whose company had helped Exxon repair its image after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and Gilbert P. Murray, the president of the California Forestry Association, an organization that lobbies for the timber industry.

Manifesto and Capture

In 1995, Kaczynski began to mail letters to former victims in which he threatened dire consequences if his paper titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” was not published in a significant newspaper or newspapers. This work, which later became known as the Unabomber manifesto, was published by the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 19, 1995. The overriding themes of the work were antigovernment, anti-big business, and antitechnology.

Law-enforcement authorities’ investigation of the Unabomber was at a standstill at the time the manifesto was published, with nothing to go on but a sketch artist’s rendering of a man in sunglasses and a hooded jacket or sweatshirt, some fingerprints, and few other clues. The fingerprints that investigators lifted from some of the bombs were later found not to match Kaczynski’s, leading some to speculate that the prints may have been part of Kaczynski’s purposeful attempts to mislead investigators. The FBI had also changed its profile of the Unabomber, describing the likely as a blue-collar mechanic who might work in the airlines industry.

After the manifesto was published, Ted Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, contacted authorizes to tell them about his suspicion that his brother was the Unabomber. He had previously seen letters written by his brother that he believed were similar to the manifesto, and forensic linguists in the FBI were able to match these writings with the manifesto. Ted Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996, in the mountains of Montana, where he had been living in a small cabin.

Although Kaczynski was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, it was determined that he was competent to stand trial. He pleaded guilty before the case went to trial, however, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He later made an attempt to withdraw his plea, but his request was denied and the court’s decision was upheld on appeal. In June 2023, Kaczynski died from suicide while in prison.

Bibliography

Arnold, Ron. Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature—The World of the Unabomber. Bellevue, Wash.: Free Enterprise Press, 1997.

Chase, Alston. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Graysmith, Robert. Unabomber: A Desire to Kill. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1997.

Sisak, Michael R., et al. "'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski Deid by Suicide in Prison Meidcal Center, AP Sources Say." AP, 19 Aug. 2024, apnews.com/article/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-1197f597364b36e56bdbcaca9837bdc4. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

"The Unabomber." Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber. Accessed 19 Aug. 2024.

Waits, Chris, and Dave Shors. Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski. Helena, Mont.: Farcountry Press, 1999.