TO BECKY GARLAND, TED KACZYNSKI WAS that “hermit kind of guy” who shopped at her family’s dry-goods store in Lincoln, Mont., a couple of times a year. “Over the years we had a few conversations about things, but we didn’t talk long. Mostly I saw him maybe every six months or so and would usually just wave ‘Hi Ted’,” she says. That changed in the summer of 1994 when Kaczynski, after years of self-imposed isolation, decided Garland was someone he could trust. Garland is president of the Lincoln chapter of Trout Unlimited, which was and is fighting a proposal to open a massive gold-mining operation in Lewis and Clark County; along with other environmental groups, Trout Unlimited was alarmed that the Blackfoot River, the trout stream featured in the book and movie “A River Runs Through it”, would be despoiled by acid-laden mine waste.
Kaczynski, who had lived a Thoreau-like existence in a crude shack five miles from Lincoln for 25 years, was known as an intensely private man-polite but aloof, a bearded eccentric who pedaled into town on a battered bicycle and never really talked about himself But this time he did. As Garland remembers it, Kaczynski showed up at her door one day looking unusually neat and clean. He proceeded to say he admired her work for environmental causes and added that he was looking for a job. “He said he was running out of funds,” Garland recalled to NEWSWEEK. “He said, “I don’t know how to go out and get a job. It’s been so long since I’ve done something like that’.” He then gave her a handwritten letter that was part resume and part autobiography. The hermit revealed himself to be a Harvard graduate with a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a brief history as a math teacher at Berkeley. He even traced his difficulties to growing up as “a genius in a kid’s body and sticking out like a sore thumb in his surroundings as a child,” Garland says.
Like everyone else in Lincoln, Becky Garland was stunned by last week’s news that the shy and gentle hermit she had known for so long may well be the notorious serial killer who, for the past 18 years, has been one of the FBI’s most-wanted men. “Looking at the news, I got some monster goose bumps,” Garland said. “I wish there was something I could have seen that would have made me know … maybe I could have saved somebody’s life.”
But nobody knew. From the time he went to Harvard in 1958 to the day his brother contacted the FBI last January, Theodore John Kaczynski seems to have disclosed himself to no one. He had no close friends, no wife and, as far as can be found, no lovers or intimates. He was a shy, brilliant boy who became a pathologically reclusive man-a mathematician of great ability, if not genius, who gave up a promising career in teaching and research for a grubby, lonely subsistence in one of the most rugged regions of the North American outback. The pattern of his life bespeaks profound alienation-an estrangement so deep it makes Thoreau, with his two-year sabbatical at Walden Pond, look like a social butterfly. Kaczynski, for all practical purposes, erased himself from human society. He has not yet been charged in the Unabomer case. But if the FBI is on the right trail, he led a double life as the diabolically elusive killer who, with his mail bombs, his manifesto and his taunts, hurled thunderbolts of prophetic judgment at the rest of us. This requires a messianic arrogance, of course-and Kaczynski, who skipped two grades in school and entered Harvard when he was only 16, was quietly arrogant all his life.
WHAT IS MISSING FROM this equation is the anger. Killing people you don’t know–people selected by some strange Luddite logic, as the Unabomer’s victims seem to have been–ordinarily requires a rage that can only come from a pivotal event or trauma that transforms one’s personality. These events can often be found within the family-some form of child abuse. “I suspect family pathology,” criminologist Michael Rustigan said last week. But there is no sign of psychic trauma in what is known of Kaczynski’s early life. And from what we know so far, there is no sign of a wounding crisis, nor any real evidence of a conversion to radical politics, during his years as student, teacher and hermit. We are missing something–or else Kaczynski, whose stubborn independence of mind often impressed his mentors, deliberately chose violence as his true career.
Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, to Wanda and Theodore R. Kaczynski of Evergreen Park, Ill. Evergreen Park is a tidy, working-class suburb of Chicago. Kaczynski’s father, who committed suicide in 1990 after being diagnosed with cancer, worked in a sausage plant in downtown Chicago and later ran a company called Cushion Pak near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Wanda Kaczynski seems to have been a doting mother; the Kaczynskis’ second son, David, was born in 1950. Although neighbors say neither parent went to college–Wanda apparently got her degree from the University of Iowa in 1968-the Kaczynskis were known as “hypereducated…… They didn’t mingle with the people on our street very much,” says LeRoy Weinberg, 74, whose house is behind the two-story black Colonial where the Kaczynskis lived. “Their kids didn’t, as far as I know, play with anybody. Ted, he just came home and went to the basement and did his thing.” Weinberg said Ted never responded when he said hello. “No other youngster in all my years has ever done that,” he said.
Spindly and sweet-faced, Ted was so bright he skipped a grade in elementary school and junior year at Evergreen Park High as well. He was a math and science whiz who spent most of his time studying and who, everyone remembers, hung out with the brains. “Sometimes he would be gregarious and kind of fun in an intense, giggly sort of way,” says Patrick Morris, a classmate. “Emotionally and socially, he was probably eight to 10 years younger than the rest of us.” Morris and Russell Mosny, another high-school friend, say it is clear in retrospect that Ted had a tough time growing up. “My feeling is that while the system attended very well to his intellectual needs, his emotional needs were neglected. In those days, nobody paid much attention to that kind of thing,” Mosny says.
OTHERS REMEMBER KACZYNSKI as a teenage bombmaker who loved blowing things upwhich sounds like a solid lead to the grisly vocation the FBI is now trying to prove. But all the brains fooled around with homemade explosives. “He was very intelligent and had a flair for pyrotechnics,” says Roger Podewell, another classmate. “We all played around with that stuff.” Morris recalls an incident with a schoolboy bomb that broke a window in chemistry class and left a girl with damaged hearing. “Somebody asked [Ted] how to put the chemicals together and he told him,” Morris says. “The dumb kid, he went ahead and did it. Ted did not do this. He wasn’t smart enough to say, ‘This is not good to do.’ His personality was not robust. He often got left holding the bag.” Mosny and Morris say he was not destructive. “He did not come across as an angry person–more as a playful person,” Morris says.
Playtime ended about the time Kaczynski entered Harvard College. This was a time when test-score meritocracy was beginning to alter Harvard’s ethos of Eastern preppyness: as a Midwesterner, a math nerd and scholarship student, Kaczynski did not fit in. It got worse in sophomore year when he was assigned to Eliot House, the last redoubt of undergraduate patrician jocks. “It was a rich kids’ place by reputation,” says Patrick McIntosh, who was one of Kaczynski’s roommates. “A bunch of us from the Midwest were put in there to try to tone down the preppy image.” Kaczynski didn’t get along with his Midwestern roommates, either. His bedroom, a single, “was the messiest room I’d ever seen,” McIntosh says. “It was a foot or two deep in trash. And it smelled, because there was spoiled milk and sandwiches underneath all that stuff.” McIntosh remembers an incident when Kaczynski, angry about something, used soap to scrawl a pig and a rude remark on the bathroom mirror–a message to his roommates, but from a lonely distance. “He was one of the strangest people I met at Harvard,” McIntosh says. “He was so intent on not being in contact with people even then. He wasn’t rude. He would smile when I would talk to him. He would answer simple questions. But there was no way to guess what he was thinking.”
Other alums are quick to defend Harvard and Eliot House as places of cheerful collegiality. But there is little question that Kaczynski, always shy, turned further inward at this time. Mathematicians as a rule are a socially awkward lot; it seems to go with their love of pure abstraction. And so it is no surprise that Kaczynski, to the extent he socialized at all, hung out with wonks. Gerald Burns, a fellow member of the class of ‘62, remembers Kaczynski from bull sessions at an all-night cafeteria with a group of math and philosophy majors. He had a “thin body, a sensitive face and cockatoo hair,” Burns says. “He was self-contained, though not exactly self-assured.” Politics never came up. The late-night sessions, Burns says, often involved Immanuel Kant, whose idealist philosophy was just the thing for brainy college kids.
The Unabomer manifesto contains many allusions to Kantian thought–and Burns says he got a call last year, after the manifesto was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, from a mutual friend who remembered Kaczynski’s fondness for Kant. “My friend was very worried that Ted was the Unabomer,” Burns says. Burns told the friend to call the FBI, which may have produced one of the early investigative leads to Kaczynski. Burns, who is now a poet, says the news hit him hard. He has written a poem, “Letter Bomb for Ted,” which takes a sympathetic view of the man many would consider to be a criminal psychopath. “Please don’t make him sound like a monster,” Burns said. “He really was a gentle person.”
NOTE THE PAST TENSE. precisely why Kaczynski turned to terrorism–if indeed he did–is what we do not know. That came much later, in 1969, when Kaczynski had given up his teaching job at Berkeley for a very different life. His Harvard class’s 20th-anniversary report in 1982 lists his address as Khadar Khel, Afghanistan, a remote village near the Khyber Pass. He may have gone there, but he was already in Montana by the early 1970s. What we do know is that Kaczynski graduated from Harvard in June 1962, and became a grad student at the University of Michigan that fall. He kept to himself and, to the faculty, seemed wholly obsessed with math. “He stood out from the other graduate students. I wasn’t aware of any political activity or social concern at the time,” says Prof. Peter Duren.
Kaczynski’s work in math was meticulous and original. His dissertation won a prize. He did independent work that led to the publication of two articles in scholarly journals, which is almost unheard of among grad students. He also solved a problem that had stumped one of his professors, George Piranian. What was striking, aside from his talent, was Kaczynski’s stubbornness. He worked in an area of advanced calculus, called boundary functions, that Duren calls “a backwater.” And he wouldn’t drop it, even when his thesis adviser, Allen Shields, tried to nudge him toward a more active field of research. Kaczynski had high standards and great integrity, his teachers say; the downside was that he tended to work in isolation. Like many who knew him, Duren is baffled and saddened by the arrest. “We’ve had some people in the department who did seem prone to violence,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have named Kaczynski.”
The search for Ted Kaczynski runs into a black hole at Berkeley, where he was hired as an assistant professor in 1967. The math department was hot and the appointment was a plum: of 10 young scholars hired that year, Kaczynski was one of three most likely to get tenure. He taught the usual courses (and got typically snotty reviews from undergraduates). He may have imbibed the yeasty mixture of campus radicalism that was all around town. But his colleagues hardly remember him. “He was not a mixer,” says John Addison, who chaired the department then. “He was withdrawn.” Still, Addison was shocked when Kaczynski abruptly resigned in 1969. “He was going to give up mathematics and wasn’t sure about what he was going to do,” Addison wrote at the time. “We tried to persuade him to reconsider, but our presentation had no apparent effect.” Looking back, Addison says “my reading today is that there was inner tension.”
What tension? Press accounts based on investigative leaks report signs of “inner rage” during Kaczynski’s days at Michigan, and one source told the San Francisco Examiner that Kaczynski was “disgusted with the widespread drug use and liberal politics” at Berkeley. Maybe so: the Unabomer manifesto is harshly critical of leftism. But all we know for certain is that Kaczynski dropped out. He turned up briefly in Salt Lake City, where he appears to have earned a living doing unspecified menial jobs, and moved to Montana some time in ‘70 or ‘71. In his Harvard class reports, he listed his home address variously as Lombard, Ill., Lisbon, Iowa, and Great Falls, Mont. Lombard and Lisbon were where his family lived at the time; Great Falls was probably his own address.
Property records show Kaczynski and his brother, David, bought 1.4 acres of land outside Lincoln in 1971. The parcel, on a dirt track called Humbug Contour Road, lies at the foot of Baldy Mountain. It is hard by the Continental Divide and surrounded by the Helena National Forest. The shack is tiny–10 feet by 12–and lacks electricity and any indoor plumbing. To neighbors, Kaczynski’s main preoccupation seemed to be vegetable gardening. He talked about developing new strains of root crops that would prosper in the short Montana growing season and boasted of being able to live on only a dollar a day. But mostly he kept to himself, venturing into town occasionally to buy supplies or food and go to the library. He was also in the habit of taking the bus to Helena, 60 miles away. There he usually stayed at the Park Hotel ($14 a night) and bought and sold used books at an outlet called Aunt Bonnie’s. The FBI is interested in his reading choices, which were usually on history or politics. But neither the librarian in Lincoln nor Rick Duncan, a clerk at Aunt Bonnie’s, will divulge the lists.
The FBI now says the cabin was a lowtech bomb factory. That fits the Unabomer’s style: all his bombs were meticulously constructed from scrap metal and wood, which made them impossible to trace. Building them took time, but Kaczynski, alone in his shack for months on end, had plenty of it. “It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb,” the Unabomer wrote last year. Federal sources also say one of two manual typewriters found in the cabin probably was used to produce the manifesto.
David Kaczynski found similar writings while cleaning out the family home in Lombard last year–a discovery that led, or forced, him to contact the FBI. The family, under siege by the news media, is plainly anguished now. Neighbors say David, a Columbia College graduate who is now a social worker in Schenectady, N.Y., never talks about his brother. But one friend says Wanda Kaczynski adores her “mathematical genius” son. The friend, Mary Ann Welch, says Mrs. Kaczynski once traveled to Montana to see Ted but met him in a nearby town and never saw the cabin where he lived. “She was concerned about his isolation from other people,” Welch says. “But she respected his decision. And she honored his privacy.”
His privacy is gone for good. In coming weeks every detail of Kaczynski’s secret life will be exhumed as evidence by those who are preparing to charge him as the Unabomer and, eventually, to put him on trial. Sixteen bombings in 17 years; 23 wounded and maimed, three people dead. Kaczynski, if convicted, could the death penalty–and as Gerald Burns writes sadly in his “Letter Bomb for Ted,” possible inclusion in a satiric fantasy called “Eminent Harvard Failures.” After 25 years in a wilderness of his own making, Ted Kaczynski in a terrible sense has come home.
In tracking the suspect to rural Montana, the Feds relied on details gathered since ‘87.
FBI provides a sketch of the Unabomer based on an eyewitness account of a man placing a bag of wooden boards behind a computer store in Salt Lake City. The bundle explodes less than an hour later.
After a six-year lull, the Unabomer strikes again. In separate incidents, two university professors are injured by mail bombs. The FBI offers a $1 million reward and sets up a toll-free number to gather leads on Unabomer suspects.
Ad exec Thomas Mosser is killed by a mail bomb sent to his home in North Caldwell, N.J.
Lobbyist Gilbert Murray is killed by a bomb in Sacramento, Calif., on the 24th. Investigators suggest the bomb is meant to divert attention from the OK Bomb attack five days earlier. (Timothy McVeigh is charged in that case.)
The New York Times and The Washington Post publish the Unabomer’s 35,000 word manifesto.
At the family home in Illinois, David Kaczynski finds papers with Unabomer-like rhetoric and alerts the FBI.
After nearly a two month stakeout and searches of the Kaczynski home in Lombard, Ill., federal agents take Ted Kaczynski into custody as a suspect in the Unabomer case. A raid on his remote mountain cabin at Stemple Pass, Mont., turns up explosive chemicals and bombmaking materials.
