Almost 25 years ago, millions of people in the United States were wandering about, fulfilling their daily tasks with little thought on what chaos could be consuming the country. In 1995, millions of Americans uncovered a world of darkness, fear, and uncertainty through The Washington Post and The New York Times with the release of the “Unabomber Manifesto” that shocked the nation to the core. Throughout his long, tiresome bombing reign, Ted Kaczynski led the federal government on a wild goose chase and wreaked havoc on the United States for over 15 years.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Ted Kaczynski, the man who would later become the infamous Unabomber, was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago to parents Wanda and Theodore (“Turk”) Kaczynski. Both blue-collar workers (manual or industrial workers), Wanda and Turk were second generation Polish Americans. Ted’s only sibling, David, would be born in 1949. Investigations into Ted’s past have revealed that Ted had a relatively normal, happy childhood, apart from one life-altering experience: At nine months old, Ted developed an aggressive case of hives that forced Ted to be quarantined over the course of 10 days in the hospital. After the incident, his mother comments that it took a while for Ted to regain his optimistic, normal attitude that the family sensed from him ever since he was born. Rather, Kaczynski developed a more shy mentality after suffering from hives, possibly due to the embarrassment and trauma from the circumstances, and struggled to be socially active. A multitude of Ted’s classmates and neighbors recall Ted being “strictly a loner”. After about 10 years had passed, the family decided to move from Chicago to a southwest suburb in Illinois: Evergreen Park, predominantly comprised of immigrants ranging from Poles, Italians, and Czechs. While living in Evergreen Park, Ted grew out of his shy personality and appeared mostly normal. But here, Ted uncovered his capacity for learning. After receiving testing, Ted has identified a genius after scoring about a 160 on an I.Q. test which was vastly different from any of his classmates (to compare, this ranked Ted as intelligent as scientists such as Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking). Excelling in the sciences and math, in sixth grade, Ted skipped ahead to eleventh grade. He even became a National Merit Finalist in his senior year. Ted remarks that because of his well-known intellect, everyone pushed him too hard which caused him to struggle socially once again with children his own age and others. Because of this Ted turned to social outcast groups for friendship but was still accepted and appreciated with his academic vigor by teachers. Graduating high school at 15, Ted was accepted into Harvard University where he thrived, apart from his sophomore year. In his sophomore year, Ted participated in a research program, led by Henry A. Murray who worked for what would become the CIA, about personality tests. But according to Murray’s colleagues, he was obsessed with the thought of mind-control and used LSD to learn how to brainwash subjects and Ted was one of the experiments. Many researchers suggest that Murray’s study was a part of the federal government’s Project MKUltra on mind-control. But along with the case of hives in his youth, this brutal and demanding experiment may have been a crucial contributor for how and why Ted became the Unabomber. Ted earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and moved on to a teaching position at the University of Michigan in 1962. Although professors and students praise his work during his time at the university, his marked the moment where Ted started to evolve: a few years into his position, Ted started to suffer from nightmares and fantasize about killing those who angered him along with the desire to break away from society. In 1967, Ted started to work at U.C. Berkeley as a professor but resigned after 2 years. He moved to Lincoln, Montana and build a remote cabin for himself. Tired of the consuming society around him, Ted wanted to live off of the most natural conditions as possible, with no running water or electricity. He remained content until the growing wilderness industrial development frustrated Ted, leading him to want to take revenge on the system and fulfill his previous fantasies. This initiated the start of the Unabomber’s reign of terror.
CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski killed three and injured twenty-four Americans through his homemade bombs. He was dubbed the “Unabomber” as it was FBI shorthand for “University and Airline Bomber, the popular bombing targets for Ted because of this belief in their role in the over-industrialization of society. Ted strongly advocated for the belief that industrialization would be the downfall of society and the destruction of nature, which is why society needs to retreat back to primitive ways in the wilderness to conserve all that is left. And the only way to do this was to bring down the big government organizations and businesses that led industrialization through violence, which would persuade Americans to follow his plan. He taught himself the art of building explosives from untraceable scrap materials and wood, making the hunt for the Unabomber immensely more difficult for authorities. Like many notorious criminals and killers such as Ted Bundy with his bite marks on victims, Kaczynski left his own signature on his works: The letters “FC” were left on his bombs, most likely indicating his identification with and support of the Freedom Club, a terrorist organization with the intent of the destruction of industrialization. All of Ted’s bombs laked fingerprints and he enjoyed leaving misleading clues to confuse and trick the authorities. A forensic examination of stray bomb components in the aftermath of bombings, along with investigations of the victims, proved useless as no connections were found. Despite the chase to catch the Unabomber being the most expensive and tiresome search by the FBI, 1995 proved to be detrimental for the FBI investigation. Ted Kaczynski mailed in a 35,000-word essay with demanding threats if the essay was not published. This became known as the Unabomber Manifesto, or “Industrial Society and Its Future” to Ted Kaczynski. It revealed Ted’s rationale for his actions and the wrongdoings of society that would cause its collapse. The manifesto appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post after FBI approval in order to gain new leads. Upon its release and the FBI’s profile of the criminal, Ted’s family connected the similarities between the profile and Ted. They contacted the authorities with the information, though authorities didn’t think much of it initially. A linguistic analysis, specifically of the handwriting and tone, of Ted’s writings and the Unabomber’s manifesto, demonstrated striking resemblances. In April 1996, the FBI arrested Ted Kaczynski at his Montana cabin. In his cabin, they discovered journal entries of bomb experiments and the Unabomber crimes, bob components, and an active bomb that would be used in the trial to further incriminate Ted. In his trial, Ted’s defense team tried to utilize the insanity defense so he would avoid the death penalty but Kaczynski refused and attempted to fire his attorneys. After Ted tried to commit suicide, he was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation that deemed him a paranoid schizophrenic. This appeared positive in the eyes of his attorneys in terms of sentencing but Ted was still fit to stand trial. Notably, through the trial, Kaczynski revealed no emotion or remorse for his actions. In January of 1998, Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty to serve 8 life sentences (avoiding the death penalty but without the possibility of parole) in a Florence, Colorado super-maximum security prison and is still alive today.
Targeting professors at colleges, airlines, and businesses, these victims meant nothing more than symbols to Ted Kaczynski. His incessant belief in destroying industrialization to cure humanity, if continued, would have wreaked more danger and terror in American citizens that imaginable. Without FBI involvement to catch Kaczynski, though it was an excessive and exhausting hunt, our societal standards and evolution, with industrialization, could have been entirely different. And although the chaos that Ted Kaczynski brought the country was a terrible time in history, this case proves the importance of criminal investigations and forensic science with handwriting analysis of documents and profiling in criminal investigations.