The manifesto ran on September 19, 1995, eight pages of small type inside The Washington Post, paid for jointly with The New York Times. The papers had printed it because the man who wrote it promised to stop killing people if they did, and because the Justice Department, after seventeen years, had nothing better to offer. In Schenectady, New York, a philosophy professor named Linda Patrik read it and told her husband that it sounded like his brother. David Kaczynski did not want to believe her. He read it anyway, and then he went looking for the letters Ted had sent the family over the years.
What he found was not a single phrase but a way of thinking: the same arguments about technology and freedom, the same contempt, the same cadence. The essay turned an old idiom around as "you can't eat your cake and have it too," and so did one of the letters. Early in 1996 David, through a Washington lawyer, took the letters to the FBI. On April 3 agents surrounded a plywood cabin, ten feet by twelve, on a hillside off Stemple Pass Road outside Lincoln, Montana, and brought out a thin, bearded man of fifty-three who had once been one of the youngest assistant professors of mathematics the University of California at Berkeley had ever hired.
The Bureau's name for the case came from its first targets. UNABOM stood for university and airline bombing, and the earliest devices had gone to exactly those places. On May 25, 1978, a package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, addressed to a professor at another school and carrying the return address of Buckley Crist, an engineering professor at Northwestern. It was sent back to Crist, who had never mailed it, and when a campus police officer named Terry Marker opened it the next day it went off in his hands. A year later a second device injured a graduate student at Northwestern's technological institute.
On November 15, 1979, a bomb in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, Chicago to Washington, began to burn when the aircraft reached altitude. It had been built with a barometric trigger, and only a faulty charge kept it from bringing the plane down. Twelve passengers were treated for smoke inhalation after an emergency landing at Dulles. A bomb on an airliner is a federal crime, and that was how the FBI came in. It would be on the case for sixteen and a half more years, in what became the longest and costliest manhunt in the Bureau's history.
The devices were handmade to a degree investigators found almost impossible to trace. The bomber carved components out of wood, filed the identifying marks off anything he could not make, and used common parts that could have come from any hardware store in the country. He left false clues, including hair he did not own. For years agents believed they were looking for someone who scavenged a junkyard, because so much of the material was old scrap.
The people who opened his packages were mostly not the people he had chosen. In May 1982 a bomb addressed to Patrick Fischer, a computer scientist who had moved from Penn State to Vanderbilt, reached Fischer's office in Nashville, and his secretary, Janet Smith, opened it. Kaczynski's journal records the result with a clerk's detachment: "I SENT A BOMB TO A COMPUTER EXPERT NAMED PATRICK FISCHER. HIS SECRETARY OPENED IT." The entry goes on to weigh what two newspapers said about her wounds, and to regret that she did not seem to have been permanently hurt.
John Hauser was a captain in the Air Force, studying for a master's degree at Berkeley, when he picked up a plastic box left on a table in a computer room at Cory Hall on May 15, 1985. It was the second bomb planted in that building. The blast took much of the use of one hand and the sight of one eye, and with them his hope of becoming an astronaut. That November a package mailed to James McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studied behavior modification, injured his research assistant, Niklaus Suino.
Hugh Scrutton was the first to die. He was thirty-eight, and he owned RenTech, a computer rental store on Howe Avenue in Sacramento. On December 11, 1985, he went out the back of the shop and reached for what looked like a piece of lumber with nails sticking out of it, left beside the lot where he parked. The notebook entry, labeled Experiment 97 in the bomber's own numbering, cites the San Francisco Examiner's report that the store's operator had been "blown to bits" and responds in five words: "EXCELLENT. HUMANE WAY TO ELIMINATE SOMEBODY."
Fourteen months later, on February 20, 1987, the same kind of disguised bomb was left behind CAAMs, a computer store in Salt Lake City. Gary Wright, who ran the business, kicked it out of the way of the parking spaces and was badly wounded; he spent years recovering the use of his left arm. A secretary in the building had watched a man in a hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses set the object down. Her description became the police sketch that made the Unabomber a recognizable figure, and it may also be why the bombing stopped. For six years nothing came.
When it resumed it was worse. Charles Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, whose research included Down syndrome, opened a package at his home in Tiburon on June 22, 1993, and lost three fingers and part of his hearing. Two days later David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, opened one in his office in New Haven. He lost most of his right hand and the sight of one eye and was very nearly killed.
Thomas Mosser was fifty, an executive with the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, and he was at home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, on the morning of December 10, 1994, a Saturday he and his family had set aside to pick out a Christmas tree. He opened a package in the kitchen. His wife, Susan, found him on the floor. "The fingers on his right hand were dangling," she told the court at the sentencing in 1998. "I held his left hand. I told him help was coming." In a letter to The New York Times the bomber later explained that he had killed Mosser because Burson-Marsteller had helped Exxon repair its image after the Exxon Valdez spill.
Gilbert Murray was forty-seven and the president of the California Forestry Association, the timber industry's lobby in Sacramento. The package that arrived at the association's office, a few blocks from the State Capitol, on April 24, 1995, was addressed to William Dennison, the man Murray had succeeded. Murray opened it, and died at the scene. He was the third person killed and the last.
By then the bomber had begun writing to newspapers and to his targets, signing as FC, a supposed group. In June 1995 he sent the Post and the Times the 35,000-word essay he called Industrial Society and Its Future, with an offer: publish it and he would stop. The same summer he threatened to blow up an airliner out of Los Angeles, then called it a prank, and air travel on the West Coast nearly stopped anyway. The Attorney General, Janet Reno, and the FBI Director, Louis Freeh, supported printing the essay on the chance that someone would recognize its author. It was the right calculation, and it had taken seventeen years to arrive at it.
The cabin held what the task force had never had: everything. There was a live bomb, packed and ready to mail. There were parts, chemicals, a typewriter, the original manuscript of the manifesto, and about forty thousand pages of journals, some of them in a numerical code of his own, which Bureau cryptanalysts broke. In the notebooks each device was a numbered experiment, followed by his reading of the newspaper coverage and his judgment on how well it had worked. The motive he gave himself there was less philosophical than the essay's. He wrote that it was "simply personal revenge," and that he had long fantasized about killing government officials, police, computer scientists, and the college students who left beer cans in the arboretum.
How a boy from Evergreen Park, outside Chicago, came to that is the part of the case most written about and least settled. Theodore John Kaczynski entered Harvard in 1958 at sixteen, earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan with work on boundary functions that his examiners thought brilliant, and began teaching at Berkeley in 1967. He quit two years later without saying why. In 1971 he and David bought land together near Lincoln, and Ted built the cabin and stayed, with no electricity and no running water, living on rabbits, deer, garden vegetables and small sums from his family. Writers have pointed to a series of psychologically punishing experiments at Harvard in which he was a subject as an undergraduate. No one has shown that it caused anything.
His lawyers, Quin Denvir and Judy Clarke of the federal defender's office, believed the only way to keep him from the death penalty was to argue that he was mentally ill. He regarded that as a humiliation and a lie about his ideas, and the fight over it consumed the trial in Sacramento before it began. He tried to fire them and asked to represent himself. In January 1998 he attempted suicide in his cell. A court-appointed psychiatrist, Sally Johnson, found him competent while giving a provisional diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, which he always rejected. On January 22, before Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., he pleaded guilty to thirteen federal counts in exchange for the government withdrawing its request for a death sentence, and admitted to all sixteen bombings.
At the sentencing on May 4, 1998, the families spoke. Susan Mosser asked the judge to lock him "so far down that when he dies he'll be closer to hell." He received four life sentences plus thirty years, without the possibility of release, and was sent to the federal supermax at Florence, Colorado. David Kaczynski, who had asked from the beginning that his brother not be executed, received the government's million-dollar reward and gave what remained after taxes to the families of the people Ted had killed and hurt. The brothers never spoke again.
The evidence against him was never really in contest, but the investigation left a mark on the Bureau of a different kind. In April 1997 the Justice Department's Inspector General reported that the explosives work of a former FBI laboratory examiner, Terry Rudolph, including work on the UNABOM devices, had not been done in a manner that would withstand scrutiny in court. The plea meant it was never tested before a jury.
Kaczynski spent twenty-three years at Florence, corresponding with admirers, writing, and objecting in print to the way he had been described. He was moved to the federal medical center at Butner, North Carolina, in 2021, ill with cancer, and was found unresponsive in his cell there early on June 10, 2023. He was eighty-one. Officials later reported that he had taken his own life.