The Story of Ted Kaczynski, AKA the ‘Unabomber’
Theodore John Kaczynski (Ted) was born in Chicago in 1942 to a working class family.
Ted was academically ahead of his classmates, even from a young age where he was described as being a “walking brain”. Ted was always hypersensitive to his feelings towards animals and felt a strong connection with the natural world.
After he graduated from Evergreen Park Community School (whilst skipping 11th grade), Ted was accepted at Harvard at the age of 16.
Ted at Harvard
While there, he participated in a study led by psychologist Henry Murray; some believe this is the event which made Ted, the Unabomber.
During these trials, Ted was still young and was put through abusive psychological experiments; the trials would violate today’s ethical standards.
Whenever Ted would submit his essay, the students were seated in-front of bright lights with electrodes wired to his head. He was then exposed to abusive interrogations where members if the ‘research team’ would attack the students beliefs.
Some believe this was the work of MK-Ultra; a top-secret CIA project in which they conducted hundreds of experiments (sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens) to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture.
Ted participated in these experiments for three years; in-turn, his mental health and wellbeing was severely affected.
These trials MAY have created the Unabomber.
He graduated from Harvard and then earned a master’s degree / doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Ted became the youngest professor in the history of Berkley with an IQ of 167; two years later he resigned.
In 1971, Ted moved into a cabin alone outside of Lincoln Montana.
He wanted to live self-sufficiently away from the reach of modern technology and the society that’d broken him.
Ted’s cabin taken after his arrest.
In 1978, Ted started to take things into his own hands.
He began targeting Universities with a series of bombs, hand-made in his cabin.
Over the seven years that followed, Kaczynski sent nine homemade pipe bombs to targets across the US, including executives at US airlines and academic administrators, leaving some in serious conditions.
Timeline of events -
May 25, 1978: A passerby found a package, addressed and stamped, in a parking lot at the University of Illinois. The package was returned to the person listed on the return address, Northwestern University Professor Buckley Crist, Jr. He did not recognise the package and called campus security, but the package exploded upon opening and injured the security officer.
May 9, 1979: A graduate student at Northwestern University is injured when he opened a box that looked like a present; it had been left in a room used by graduate students and nobody saw the person who dropped it off.
November 15, 1979: American Airlines Flight 444 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., fills with smoke after a bomb detonates in the luggage compartment. The plane lands safely, since the bomb did not work as intended; several passengers suffer from smoke inhalation. This device had been created to explode at a certain altitude; this detail made the FBI really take notice of the case, because this showed a high level of intellect and design.
June 10, 1980: United Airlines President Percy Woods is injured when he opened a package holding a bomb encased in a book called Ice Brothers by Sloan Wilson.
October 8, 1981: A bomb wrapped in brown paper and tied with string is discovered in the hallway of a building at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The bomb is safely detonated without causing injury.
May 5, 1982: A bomb sent to the head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University injures his secretary, after she opened it in his office.
July 2, 1982: A package bomb left in the break room of Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley explodes and injures an engineering professor.
May 15, 1985: Another bomb in Cory Hall at the University of California, Berkeley injures an engineering student.
June 13, 1985: A suspicious package sent to Boeing Fabrication Division in Washington is safely detonated, but most of the forensic evidence was lost.
November 15, 1985: A University of Michigan psychology professor and his assistant are injured when they opened a package containing a three-ring binder that had a bomb. The bomber included a letter asking the professor to review a student’s master thesis.
December 11, 1985: A bomb left in the parking lot of a Sacramento computer store kills the store’s owner, Hugh Scrutton; the Unabomber has officially claimed his first victim. A composite sketch was made based on a witness recollection, this is the image that was created.
February 20, 1987: Another bomb left in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City computer store severely injures the son of the store’s owner. A store employee sees the man leave the bomb, and that witness account helped a sketch artist create the composite sketch.
June 22, 1993: A geneticist at the University of California is injured after opening a package that exploded in his kitchen.
June 24, 1993: A prominent computer scientist from Yale University lost several fingers to a mailed bomb.
December 19, 1994: An advertising executive is killed by a package bomb sent to his New Jersey home.
April 24, 1995: A mailed bomb kills the president of the California Forestry Association in his Sacramento office - this was Ted’s last attack.
Original sketch from an eyewitness
At this point, the FBI was hot on the trail of the Unabomber. They didn’t know if this was the work of one man, or a group.
Ted wanted the media to publish his manifesto labelled “industrial society and its future”.
This paper was an ideology that opposes technology, pushing nature forward and warning people of the effect that an increase in socialisation will cause to the general public.
He believed we were being controlled by those above us, feeding us medicine to cure the depression they’ve caused; an idea which looks even more likely in 2022.
It was Ted’s brother, David who eventually led to his capture.
David shared a lot of the same views as Ted (although not the Ted’s extent) and was already suspicious of his actives.
David and his wife became suspicious of some of the language within this manifesto which they’d read, David had also recalled part of this being shown to him previously, years before by Ted.
““Well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too””
He found the copy which Ted had given him years before and although there were slight changes, it was this that led to his capture.
On April 3rd, 1996, Ted was apprehended and his cabin searched by the FBI.
They found him in his cabin, surrounded by bomb-making materials.
Later the same month, Ted was sentenced to 10 counts of illegally transporting and using bombs, and three counts of murder.
Attorneys wanted Ted to plead insanity, but he pleaded guilty to all charges.
In 2022, Ted’s still currently alive serving eight life sentences at the Supermax security prison.
While there, Ted’s published two books - Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber” and Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How
Although many people are against how Ted went against the system, people are becoming more aware of his manifesto and agree with the words he wrote.
The irony that the FBI created themselves a ‘monster’ which (if left to their own devices) would have evaded their grasp is fascinating.
Do you believe?
