Crimes of the Century (2013–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - The Unabomber - full transcript
He was a brilliant
mathematician who hated society.
He was extremely smart
but socially awkward.
He started fantasizing
about killing people.
The Unabomber left
his angry mark of death.
He orchestrated a vicious bombing spree that
killed three, maimed four, and injured 19 others.
In all, 16 bombs at locations
all over the United States.
I began to think,
"Well, I may not make it."
His base of operations was crude...
The cabin was a bomb factory.
but his devices
were hideously lethal.
Matches, pieces of wood, nails.
That's an antipersonnel device.
That's used to maim or kill.
For almost two decades, he skillfully
evaded identification and capture.
We had literally hundreds
and hundreds of suspects.
He dropped out of sight
for six years.
People thought he was dead.
He was obsessed about leaving
fingerprint evidence.
Nobody's ever seen anybody
like Theodore Kaczynski.
The hunt
for the Unabomber, next.
A simple sketch was almost all
investigators had to go on.
The facial features were
distinct, but the head was
cloaked by a hood, and the eyes
obscured by aviator sunglasses.
For more than 17 years, he
operated without restraint.
In all that time, no one knew who he was
or how exactly he chose his targets.
Even his victims remained
in the dark until he struck.
I had never heard of the
Unabomber before I was injured.
I learned about the existence of the Unabomber
two days after I came home from the hospital.
An unseasonably warm and
sunny day in Salt Lake City.
Police and emergency personnel
respond to a report
of an explosion outside CAAMS
Computer Services.
Owner Gary Wright had arrived
at his office at 10:25 A.M.
When I pulled into the parking lot, I
noticed that there was a piece of wood
over to the right-hand side,
near my secretary's car...
two 2x4s that appeared to be
nailed together.
I thought, "Well, it's just a piece of
scrap lumber from a construction project.
It's got nails
sticking out of it.
I should probably throw it away.
Somebody will step on it.
It'll get run over."
But as I bent down to pick it
up, there was a slight click,
and instantly I could feel this huge pressure
in my chest like almost a crushing pressure.
And I heard what sounded like
a fighter jet going over.
At that point, I didn't know
that it had been a bomb.
What I honestly thought is that
someone had shot me with a shotgun.
I began to think,
"Well, I may not make it."
The explosion has severed nerves
in Wright's left arm
and impaled more than 200
pieces of shrapnel in his body.
Investigators quickly determine
that Gary Wright
has just become the latest
victim of the Unabomber,
a shadowy figure who's been engaged in a campaign
of terror across the country for nine years.
The case we call Unabomb
actually began in may of 1978
and continued until the last bomb was
delivered in the U.S. mail in April of 1995.
And during that time, Unabomber
placed or mailed 16 devices.
The first device explodes at Northwestern
University, just north of Chicago.
Disguised as an
ordinary package,
the bomb inflicts minor injuries
on a university police officer.
A year later, Northwestern
is hit a second time.
When another package detonates on campus,
graduate student John G. Harris sustains cuts
on his arms and burns
around his eyes.
Then, on November 15, 1979, a bomb is placed in
the cargo hold of American Airlines flight 444,
heading from Chicago
to Washington, D.C.
In mid-flight, it sets off
a smoldering fire.
12 passengers suffer
smoke inhalation.
The pilots were able to land the plane at
Dulles, shortly before they said to us later
that it would have probably burned through the
hydraulics and dropped the plane out of the sky.
Authorities now begin to suspect
the bombings are linked.
All doubt is removed
seven months later.
A suspicious package arrives at the home of
Percy Wood, the President of United Airlines.
The subsequent explosion inflicts cuts and
burns over large portions of Wood's body.
Now, come 1980, we know
we have a serial bomber,
and so the FBI started working
as a joint task force
with ATF and, because we had bombs in the
mail, with the Postal Inspection Service.
The task force dubs
the investigation Unabomb.
Unabomb... universities
and airline bombings...
because those first four bombs were either affiliated
with university locations or with airlines.
From the beginning, the investigation
is hampered by a lack of evidence.
The Unabomber's devices
are relatively crude,
making it difficult to trace
them back to their maker.
There wasn't a lot of evidence left, and
the evidence that we could identify...
matches, pieces of wood, nails... were
the kind of things that you could buy
at any hardware store.
We started calling him early
the Junkyard Bomber,
because, in fact, he would make
these bombs from scratch.
He didn't go buy components and buy
pieces of metal and that type of thing.
He went out to piles of old
abandoned cars to carve off
chrome to use in his bomb
construction.
He used scraps of wood.
Well, everything you find at a bomb
scene... every single piece of evidence...
is critical because, for one, you have
to decide how the device functioned.
And in finding out how the device functioned,
you look if there's a circuitry involved,
where, in most of his devices,
he createdthe circuitry.
And it was not through a timer
like many bombers use.
He actually took the time to create the
mechanism, to create the circuits,
and that made it really
difficult for investigators.
He built his own switches
for the bombs from hickory.
And when he bought batteries, he would peel off
the cover of those batteries so we wouldn't
be able to go back and trace where those
batteries might have been purchased.
There was no evidence that would lend itself
to take us to a particular manufacturer,
vendor, sales documents, a
person's name on a purchase order.
There wasn't anything like that
connected with the devices.
But as the attacks continued, the bombs
became more sophisticated and more lethal.
A pipe bomb mailed to the head of the computer
department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville
explodes when it's opened
by a secretary.
She sustains severe burns to her hands
and shrapnel wounds to her body.
Two months later, at the University
of California, Berkeley,
a package explodes when engineering
professor Diogenes Angelakos picks it up.
He, too, suffers severe burns
and shrapnel wounds.
Usually in bombings, or in any kind of serial
crime, you can look at what they call victimology.
And you try and determine,
perhaps, people or businesses
or something that all of the victims had
in common with the suspect, or the person
who's doing the bombings
in this case.
With Unabomb, none of these people, none of the
victims over the years, had any connections.
Did they go to the same
universities,
did they have difficulty with one person, and was
there a commonality between all the victims?
And that was very difficult, because
we had literally hundreds and hundreds
of suspects.
There are no
incidents for almost two years.
Then, on May 15, 1985, engineering student
and aspiring astronaut John E. Hauser
is nearly killed when he picks up a parcel left
in a computer room on the U.C. Berkeley campus.
Zap!
And exploded, blew my arm off
to the side like this.
And the first thing I thought
was, "Why did they do that?"
Six months later, a package mailed to
the home of a University of Michigan
Psychology professor explodes
when research assistant
Nicklaus Suino opens it.
Suino sustains burns
and shrapnel wounds.
The professor suffers
some hearing loss.
One month later,
on December 11, 1985,
the Unabomber claims his first
fatality with his 11th bomb.
Computer-rental store owner
Hugh Scrutton is killed
when he picks up what appears
to be a piece of scrap wood.
Metal shrapnel penetrates his heart
and tears off his right hand.
This bomb contains a clue that had become
known as the Unabomber's signature...
a metal plate stamped
with the letters "F.C."
"F.C." became one of the standard ways
of us being able to tie in one bombing
with another and, over the years, became one of
the giveaways that this was a Unabomb device.
But the "F.C." signature shed no light
on the identity of the Unabomber
or even if he was
only one person.
Throughout the investigation,
one of the main questions was,
"Is this a lone actor, or is
there a group involved?"
There wasn't clear evidence one way
or the other for quite a while.
Finally, on February 20, 1987, investigators got
their first break with the Gary Wright bombing.
One of my employees had
actually seen a person place
this device outside in the parking lot
about 25 minutes prior to when I arrived.
He stared at her, emotionless, and once he
was done pulling the device out of the bag
and setting it there,
simply got up and walked away.
The result of the employee's description was this
now-famous composite sketch of the suspect...
a white male wearing aviator
sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt.
This was the first time that anybody
knew what the Unabomber looked like.
For all these years prior
to that, nobody knew.
But another
nine years would pass before
the Unabomber was actually identified, and the
truth would be stranger than anyone ever imagined.
After nine years and 12 attacks, the
FBI finally had a physical description
of the mystery man known as the Unabomber,
but the psychological profiles were mixed.
One said he was a young college
student, possibly still a teenager.
Another had him as a white-collar
professional, living with his mother.
The reality was
very, very different.
The Unabomber was, in fact,
a brilliant middle-aged
mathematician who had abandoned
a promising academic career to
live like a hermit in this cabin
in the Montana wilderness.
His name was Ted Kaczynski.
He was extremely smart
but socially awkward.
In retrospect, we would have to
consider a diagnosis such as
Asperger's Syndrome, where he had a hard time
reading clues of other people's emotions.
Theodore "Ted"
Kaczynski was born on May 22,
1942, to a working-class family
in Chicago, Illinois.
The older of two brothers,
he excelled academically.
In the fifth grade,
tests indicated that his I.Q.
was 167... genius level.
As he was so smart, he skipped two grades, which
then made him even more socially awkward,
because now he was with students
two years older than him.
In high school, the shy, young genius set his
sights on the best... Harvard University.
He was only 16 when he went
to Harvard.
He came from a very modest background, and in
Harvard, it's a very snobby kind of environment
and he was also socially maladjusted,
so it was a disaster for him.
At Harvard,
Kaczynski was one of 22
student volunteers picked to take part in a
personality study of gifted undergraduates.
What the participants didn't
know was that the study was
allegedly part of a secret program funded
by the CIA and military intelligence.
What they did was
essentially interview these kids
and put them up against someone
who ridiculed them mercilessly.
Now, this is something that if
you do that to someone who's
not socially confident anyway, it's going to
be very, at the least, difficult to deal with.
Some experts later surmised that the Harvard
experiments might have played a role
in Kaczynski's emotional
problems.
I think they took advantage
of a young, very vulnerable
person as a subject, and they
really treated him badly.
I mean, they really, you know,
played games with their mind.
Kaczynski graduated
from Harvard in 1962.
He enrolled at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where he earned his PhD
in Mathematics at age 24.
In 1967, he became an assistant professor
at the University of California, Berkeley,
teaching undergrad courses
in Calculus and Geometry.
He was the youngest professor
ever hired by the university,
but Kaczynski was not popular
with his students.
He didn't get very good ratings
as a teacher at Berkeley.
He was very uninvolved
with the students,
rather contemptuous of them and their
miniscule intellects, compared to his own.
During this time, Kaczynski was growing increasingly
disillusioned with contemporary society.
This was someone who was
deeply disturbed.
And if you can't deal with society
as it is... or people as they are...
how are you going to deal with
a society that's changing?
It was when he was at Ann Arbor that he
started fantasizing about killing people
who were tools of
the industrial society.
But by the time he went to
Berkeley, he was already
determining that he was going to
work for a couple of years,
save up money, and then go move out to the
woods and just drop out of society altogether.
In 1969, Kaczynski abruptly
resigned his teaching position.
He later bought land in a rural area near
Lincoln, Montana, and hand-built a new home...
this 10-by-12-foot cabin without
electricity or running water.
He soon realized, however, that even in the
wilderness, he could not avoid society.
It would infuriate him when
he'd be out in this wilderness
area and people would come
through on snowmobiles.
It infuriated him that these planes
would fly over where he was.
He would actually take his .22 and try to shoot
at a plane at about 40,000 feet because it's like
he couldn't get away from society
and technical things like that.
And so I think all those things
are what drove him to kind of
retaliate against society which
wouldn't leave him alone.
Mr. Kaczynski was alienated
from society.
And once he made up his mind to start killing
people, he used all his intelligence to do it.
Kaczynski started
his bombing campaign in 1978.
His first devices were somewhat
crude and ineffectual.
Over the years,
he perfected his techniques.
Kaczynski kept meticulous notes and
apparently followed his own exploits
through newspaper accounts, producing a
chilling record of a man obsessed by killing.
In reference to the primitive bomb left
on campus at Northwestern University,
he wrote, "I hoped that a student would pick it
up and would blow his hands off or get killed."
After his second bomb caused
minor injuries, he complained,
"I had hoped that the victim would be blinded or
have his hands blown off or be otherwise maimed.
I wish I knew how to get hold
of some dynamite."
As you go through some of the
writings that he had written
over the years, he makes it very clear that, "My
ambition is to kill a scientist, a businessman.
I'd even like to kill a government
official or a Communist."
He complained again, after the 1982 bomb
that injured the secretary at Vanderbilt,
"No indication that
she was permanently disabled.
Frustrating that I can't seem
to make a lethal bomb."
Finally, after the attack that
killed computer-rental store
owner Hugh Scrutton, Kaczynski
wrote in triumph, "Excellent.
Humane way to eliminate
somebody.
He probably never felt a thing."
For nine years, the
Unabomber had evaded capture,
outwitting law enforcement by using
low-tech methods and staying off the grid.
But after he was spotted in the Salt Lake City
parking lot in 1987, he seemed to vanish.
It's been a year
since the Unabomber
left his angry mark of death.
After he committed that bombing, and
that composite was circulated in 1987,
he dropped out of sight
for six years.
He could have been incarcerated,
he could have had health issues,
but, you know, you also have to realize that
it was the first time ever, since 1978,
that he had ever been seenplacing a device,
so it could have been because he was fearful
that he would be caught.
The Unabomber, from 1987
to 1993, did nothing.
People thought he was dead.
But what he was doing, he was really
learning how to build better bombs.
It wasn't until June of 1993
that the Unabomber surfaced again, sending
a letter to The New York Times, saying,
"We're the terrorist group F.C.
We have more to say,
and we'll get back in touch
with you later."
"F.C." apparently
stood for "Freedom Club."
Theodore Kaczynski's assertion that it was a
terrorist group was another misdirection.
"F.C." would now take
responsibility for a renewed
wave of attacks.
That same month, the Unabomber
finally struck again.
The package bomb blew as Dr. Charles Epstein
opened his mail at his home, late Tuesday.
Charles Epstein was a renowned geneticist from
the University of California, San Francisco.
Epstein is recovering from four hours
of surgery to his hands, arm, and face.
News of the bombing hit hard for
previous victim Gary Wright.
I came home from work, the
news was on, and he was back.
It unglued me.
It was just devastating.
Two days later and 3,000 miles away, another
bomb arrived at the office of David Gelernter,
a Computer Science professor
at Yale University.
I just heard
a very loud explosion.
And then we heard a man
screaming.
Gelernter survived
but was seriously injured.
Why would anyone want to blow
up a professor who specializes
in the languages used
to program computers?
The Unabomber was back in action, and
investigators were no closer to finding him
than they'd been when he
started, 15 years earlier.
The Unabomber... he was obsessed with ensuring
that he threw us off the trail forensically,
and so he would do
a number of things.
The return addresses on the Unabomb devices were
real names of real people at real addresses
of, say, their home or place
of business.
Others were a location that actually
existed but actually a phony address.
There was no such business
at that particular address.
And still others were meant
to mock the FBI.
For example, on one of the
letters the Unabomber sent,
the address was 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue
Northwest in Washington, D.C., which, of course,
is the address of the
J. Edgar Hoover FBI building.
In one of his letters, he said,
"The FBI is a joke.
The FBI will not be catching us
anytime soon."
The FBI, of course, had no idea about the Unabomber's
identity or whereabouts, and Ted Kaczynski
took great pains to make sure
he didn't leave a single clue.
He would take files, and he would file
everything down after he built something
so that he could ensure that he
was getting rid of fingerprints.
He was obsessed about leaving
fingerprint evidence.
Kaczynski also planted false clues to
throw investigators off the trail.
He went to a bathroom at the bus
station in Missoula, Montana,
and he actually took hairs off
the floor of the restroom.
And then, in subsequent bombs, he would take those
hairs and put them in between layers of tape.
And the whole idea was, when
those subsequent bombs exploded
at a crime scene, that we would think that hair
might have something to do with the Unabomber.
When he was out on a run to collect information
or to collect components for his bombs,
he would make sure he had
a disguise.
He'd put cotton up his nose so
his nostrils would look bigger.
He had a fake mustache
that he had worn.
For another 18 months,
everything was quiet.
Then, on December 10, 1994, the
Unabomber claimed his second fatality.
The latest victim was advertising
executive Thomas Mosser.
In all, 16 bombs in 17 years at
locations all over the United States.
Thomas Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent
to his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
As it turned out, Mosser had
been targeted because Kaczynski
mistakenly believed that he had
helped Exxon clean up its public
image after
the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Just over three months later, the Unabomber's
reign of terror was suddenly overshadowed
by a much more
destructive blast.
On the morning of April 19th, we all get
the call there's been a terrible bombing
in Oklahoma City.
So we're really focused on this, at this
point, because everybody's going to be asking,
"Is this the Unabomber?"
And we gave our best assessment
then that we didn't think it was,
because these are different personalities,
these are different types of bombings.
One is specific targeted,
the other is a mass murder.
Any thought that the Unabomber was responsible
for Oklahoma City was quickly erased,
when Timothy McVeigh was arrested
two days after the blast.
Ted Kaczynski, it seems, had his
own agenda and his own timetable.
When the Oklahoma City
bombing was happening,
Theodore Kaczynski was already
on a bus, on his way to deliver
the package for sending
to his next victim.
On April 24th, just five days after Oklahoma
City, a mail bomb killed Gilbert Murray,
President of the California Forestry
Association, a timber-industry lobbying group.
In an earlier incarnation, the group had
been targeted by radical environmentalists.
The bomb that was sent to the Forestry Association
was actually sent to his predecessor...
a man named William Dennison.
But he had retired, and
Mr. Murray had replaced him.
The Unabomber was very proud
of himself.
It didn't matter that his bomb
had killed the wrong man.
They were engaged in the same kind of work,
which was anti-environment, in his opinion,
and so it was okay.
I've been to a number of bomb scenes over
my career, and the last one, in Sacramento,
was probably one of
the more horrific.
The shrapnel is usually what
maims or kills the victim.
Most of the cases, nails,
staples, and screws were used.
That's an antipersonnel device.
That's used to maim or kill.
When you go to those crime scenes or when you
see the devastation that was left behind,
and then you read about what he says and how he
felt about those bombs, it's really chilling.
It's chilling that someone can think like that,
behave like that, and do that kind of thing.
By now, the Unabomber had been
at large for almost 17 years.
We talk about lone actors a lot and
how difficult they are to catch.
The Unabomber was the lone wolf
in the most classic sense.
Socially, he defined himself
as a social cripple.
But technologically...
ironically, because he was
so anti-technology...
he absolutely had utmost confidence in his
ability to keep from blowing himself up.
Nobody's ever seen anybody
like Theodore Kaczynski.
By the time the Unabomber claims his third
fatality, his bombs have become more effective,
and investigators still have
no idea who is responsible.
But with the death of Gilbert Murray of
the California Forestry Association,
the case suddenly takes
a surprising turn.
Within days, the Unabomber sent letters
to several people and claimed credit
for the Murray bombing and started talking about
the notion that the terrorist group F.C. is
going to send out a manifesto and
wants either The New York Times
or The Washington Post
to publish that manifesto.
And if, in fact, they do, the terrorist group
F.C. will desist from committing terrorist acts.
Two months later, the Unabomber
sends a 35,000-word manuscript
to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
Bob Guccione at Penthouse Magazine, among others.
Titled "Industrial Society
& Its Future,"
the essay becomes known
as "The Unabomber Manifesto."
There were many people who
thought "The Unabomb Manifesto"
was a red herring.
I had a couple of agents
come to my office and say,
"We're wasting too much time
on 'The Unabomber Manifesto.'
We need to stick with forensics.
We need to stick
with known facts."
Most people in the FBI never
even read the manifesto.
The popular opinion was that it was
nonsense, it was just scribbling.
The media and the
FBI are faced with a dilemma.
Publishing the manifesto could be seen
as giving in to terrorist demands.
The last thing we wanted to do is set a
precedent that we would be blackmailed
into publishing terrorist manifestos, because
every terrorist could come out of the woodwork
and decide, "This is nice.
We'll try this, too."
Attorney General Janet Reno called us to a
meeting, and essentially what we said to her was,
"The reason you should publish this is,
somebody out there has seen these words before,
and they're going to
recognize him by his words."
The Washington Post publishes the
manifesto on September 19, 1995.
After the publication of
"The Unabomber Manifesto,"
we received almost 55,000 calls.
We had wives turning in their husbands, we
had girlfriends turning in their boyfriends,
we had all kinds of people submitting
written samples of people's work.
Among the thousands of people who believe they
recognize the style of the writer is Linda Patrik,
the wife of Ted Kaczynski's
brother, David.
David Kaczynski's wife was on sabbatical in
Paris and saw some excerpts from the manifesto.
She recognized his phrasing
because David had showed her
letters from Ted and told her
about Ted's preoccupations.
I think it's partly that the voice
in the manifesto is a Chicago voice.
Phrases or just the grammar,
perhaps.
The Kaczynski brothers have been
estranged for several years.
When David reads the manifesto, he
must confront a sobering realization.
David recognized, in the manifesto,
echoes of his brother's wording.
David said that one thing that
really, really struck him was
seeing the term
"coolheaded logicians."
He said that's directly
out of Ted's mouth.
There was a strain of Ted's
philosophy in every paragraph.
So it was just becoming
impossible
for them to not push it further.
Through a lawyer, David
Kaczynski contacts the FBI.
He submits a copy of an essay that Ted had
written in 1971 to compare to the manifesto.
It was very clear to me
by the third paragraph,
when the hair on the back of my neck stood up,
what I was reading, which was a 1971 essay,
was identical in many ways
to the manifesto.
The biggest problem for David was, he was
afraid that if the government came to suspect
Ted Kaczynski on their own, they would storm the
cabin and Ted would be killed in the encounter.
He wanted to prevent
more violence.
He didn't want anybody else
to die.
David's information
leads authorities to Ted's
Montana cabin, which is put
under surveillance.
The FBI proceeds with caution, to ensure that any
evidence they obtain is admissible in court,
but they're also in a race
against time.
Now there was some real urgency because we
knew this is the primary time, over the years,
that the Unabomber had hit the
road and started mailing devices.
So we were very concerned that
while we're trying to put all of
this together, he could actually get out, get
on a bus, and go and deliver another bomb.
Then, just as the task force is putting
its plan in place, word leaks out
and kicks the operation
into overdrive.
And Dan Rather
called Louis Freeh,
the director of the FBI,
and said,
"We have information about
who your Unabomb suspect is.
It's a guy in Montana
in a cabin."
And Louis said, "Wait.
Give us 24 hours."
CBS News told the FBI director, "We had
planned on going to the air tonight
with this information."
They said,
"Well, we can hold off
unless the competition
finds out."
With the clock ticking, the
authorities close in on Kaczynski.
And when the news breaks,
it's on the FBI's terms.
A few hours ago, U.S. law-enforcement
agents took into custody a Montana man
suspected of being
the mysterious Unabomber.
While the Unabomb task force scrambles to obtain
a search warrant on Ted Kaczynski's cabin,
dozens of agents descend
upon Lincoln, Montana.
Between noon on April 2nd
and midnight on April 2nd,
we flew about 150 people from
San Francisco into Montana
on the last two flights out
and got everybody in position.
We chose some members of our S.W.A.T. team to
do work in the mountains, to cut off any places
where Kaczynski might run.
We were worried that there
would be nothing in the cabin
and therefore no evidence,
and be back at square one.
By the next morning, the arrest
team is ready to move in.
With the help of a local forestry agent,
Kaczynski is lured from his cabin
and taken into custody
without incident.
After 16 attacks, 26 victims, and almost 18 years,
the hunt for the Unabomber is finally over.
Theodore Kaczynski never
expected any law enforcement
would get anywhere near his cabin in
Montana, and it's a good thing he didn't,
because he would have booby-trapped
that thing and blown it sky-high.
Investigators carefully
begin to search the cabin.
The cabin smelled inside.
He had a bathroom that he literally had
to dig into the floor of the cabin.
There was no running water.
There was no electricity.
Theodore Kaczynski himself
smelled terribly
and probably hadn't taken a
shower for a long, long time...
in fact, probably not since his last bombing run,
because there was no place to take a shower.
This was not
your Lake Tahoe chalet.
Inside the tiny 10-by-12-foot structure
lies a treasure trove of evidence.
The cabin was a bomb factory.
There were all kinds
of containers.
And in those containers, he had
essentially handmade bomb components.
In one container, he had extra switches...
those hickory switches...
some of which we found
at crime scenes.
He had containers that had formulas on
them, and we came to find out later,
these were mixtures of where
he had experimented.
And there were a number
of notebooks.
Those notebooks contain what
came to be over 30,000 pages of
handwritten notes, because all
of those years he had spent
in the cabin, he had been
keeping journals.
He had been keeping copious notes of everything
he'd done and of all his bomb experiments.
But he threw us a curve,
because, when we went to go
through those notes, several hundred pages
of them were written in a mathematical code.
When we sent all this back to
the FBI lab, they said,
"This mathematical code is
probably more complicated
than anything we've seen since the height
of the Cold War from the KGB itself."
During the search of his cabin,
investigators discover that Kaczynski
had no intention of stopping
his campaign of terror.
They found a live device
underneath his bunk.
It turned out that he, as we
had surmised, was not going to
honor his promise not to send
any more bombs.
This thing was ready to go.
All it needed was the address and the
postage, and it would have been gone.
A federal grand jury indicts Ted Kaczynski on
multiple counts of illegally transporting,
mailing, and using bombs.
The government will also seek the death
penalty for the murders of Hugh Scrutton,
Thomas Mosser,
and Gilbert Murray.
Faced with overwhelming evidence tying
him to the Unabomber crimes, Kaczynski's
court-Appointed lawyers attempt to enter an
insanity defense to save him from execution.
Kaczynski adamantly objects.
He distrusts any
mental-health professionals.
He thinks that they do
mind control.
And he's very proud of his
rational reasoning ability.
And the idea that he was any way
affected with any kind
of mental illness would go just
to the heart of who he was.
Mr. Kaczynski had a very, very strong belief
that he did not want to be labeled mentally ill.
Number one, he did not believe
he wasmentally ill.
And, number two, he did not want
to taint his philosophical view,
where he was trying to influence the public,
as being discarded as the ravings of a madman.
He would prefer the death penalty,
rather than being labeled mentally ill.
As his trial date approaches, Kaczynski tries
to get his court-appointed lawyers dismissed.
The judge said, "No, we will
not let you have different
attorneys, because it would take at least three
months for new attorneys to get up to speed.
We've already impaneled the juries, we've
brought witnesses in from around the country,
we've brought victims in."
So then Kaczynski said, "In
that case, I'll defend myself,
pro se, and I don't need three
months to get up to speed."
And at that point, the judge
said, "No, I won't allow it."
Kaczynski, that night, attempted to hang
himself in his jail cell with his underpants.
The suicide attempt, along
with other factors,
prompts the judge to order an examination
by forensic psychiatrist Sally Johnson.
Dr. Johnson diagnoses Kaczynski as
suffering from paranoid schizophrenia,
but declares him
competent to stand trial.
The defense experts, and Sally Johnson,
who was neutral, who had no ax to grind,
concluded that he actually
was psychotic.
And her diagnosis of him being
psychotic caused the government
to be willing to allow him to plead guilty
and take the death penalty off the table.
He had two choices. He either took the plea
bargain or we went ahead with the trial.
And then we felt we were
required to and we were going to
present evidence
of mental condition.
And the idea of that was so devastating
to him that he'd rather plead guilty.
In January 1998, Kaczynski
agrees to a plea agreement,
under which he pleads guilty
and is sentenced to life
in prison without
the possibility of parole.
He was willing to accept the death penalty
rather than to besmirch his philosophy.
But given the choice of pleading guilty and
avoiding the death penalty, he chose to take it.
On January 22, 1998, Theodore Kaczynski,
A.K.A. the Unabomber, is sentenced to
life in prison without parole.
During his sentencing hearing, some of his
victims are allowed to address him directly.
I didn't see any contrition or
any sort of guilt on his face.
I only saw shock when I told him
that I forgave him.
And then that was the point
I knew that I had him.
Designated a domestic terrorist by the FBI,
Ted Kaczynski is currently incarcerated
at the Super Max facility
in Fremont County, Colorado.
In some ways, he probably does a lot better
there, in that extremely structured environment,
than he ever did when he was living
up in the wilderness up in Montana.
And as he always had problems dealing with other
people, the fact that he's isolated from them
is probably not as difficult for him as
it would be for a lot of other people.
Kaczynski's cabin was seized as
evidence and removed from the property.
It is now on display at the
Newseum in Washington, D.C.
On August 10, 2006,
Judge Garland Burrell Jr.
Ordered that the personal items
confiscated from the cabin be
sold at auction and that the
proceeds go to the bombing victims.
The auction raised
over $232,000.
Ted Kaczynski's brother, David, received the
$1 million reward for the Unabomber's capture.
After paying his legal expenses, he donated
the rest of the reward money to the families
of his brother's victims.
He said, "I know I could have had my brother's
blood on my hands through an execution,
but I couldn't have had innocent
people's blood on my hands."
After the trial, Gary Wright and
David developed a close friendship.
They have appeared together at
numerous speaking engagements.
We speak on
social-justice issues.
We speak on healing and
forgiveness and stuff like that.
People are always saying, "Wow.
That's such an unlikely
friendship."
David Kaczynski no longer speaks
publicly about his brother's crimes.
He is currently the executive director of
a Tibetan monastery in upstate New York.
Three people were killed
outright by Kaczynski's bombs.
23 other people were injured,
some severely maimed.
But investigators never discovered a
definitive pattern to the Unabomber's victims.
You never really fully come
to terms with understanding why
he would do this... why he would pick such
random victims, in some respects, and, you know,
and do the things that he did.
You and I would never think
that way.
Ted Kaczynski, like Timothy McVeigh, was a
game changer with respect to terrorism.
If we go to a federal office
building or if we get our mail,
these are places
where we expect safety.
And, indeed, the Postal Service
changed their methods
for accepting and transporting packages
and mail, due to Ted Kaczynski.
Chief among the
changes in postal security
is the requirement that packages
weighing more than 13 ounces
be mailed in person at a post office,
rather than placed in a mailbox.
But beyond the security measures, the biggest
impact of Kaczynski's campaign of terror
has been on the victims.
In the years since the bombings, at
least four have died of natural causes,
but others still bear the scars,
both physical and emotional.
You will never be the same.
You accept it.
You will never have closure.
There is no such a word
as "closure."
Closure does not exist.
Life is different.
Now you get to choose what
you're gonna do with it.
You can be bitter, you can be
angry, or you can be happy.
And those are your choices.
While some of Ted Kaczynski's
victims have managed to move on,
it seems that Kaczynski himself
never will.
Ted Kaczynski has absolutely
no feelings of remorse
or sympathy or regret or
anything for any of his victims.
They were all soldiers of the technological
society, as far as he was concerned.
He had a higher purpose, and
they were immaterial to him.
mathematician who hated society.
He was extremely smart
but socially awkward.
He started fantasizing
about killing people.
The Unabomber left
his angry mark of death.
He orchestrated a vicious bombing spree that
killed three, maimed four, and injured 19 others.
In all, 16 bombs at locations
all over the United States.
I began to think,
"Well, I may not make it."
His base of operations was crude...
The cabin was a bomb factory.
but his devices
were hideously lethal.
Matches, pieces of wood, nails.
That's an antipersonnel device.
That's used to maim or kill.
For almost two decades, he skillfully
evaded identification and capture.
We had literally hundreds
and hundreds of suspects.
He dropped out of sight
for six years.
People thought he was dead.
He was obsessed about leaving
fingerprint evidence.
Nobody's ever seen anybody
like Theodore Kaczynski.
The hunt
for the Unabomber, next.
A simple sketch was almost all
investigators had to go on.
The facial features were
distinct, but the head was
cloaked by a hood, and the eyes
obscured by aviator sunglasses.
For more than 17 years, he
operated without restraint.
In all that time, no one knew who he was
or how exactly he chose his targets.
Even his victims remained
in the dark until he struck.
I had never heard of the
Unabomber before I was injured.
I learned about the existence of the Unabomber
two days after I came home from the hospital.
An unseasonably warm and
sunny day in Salt Lake City.
Police and emergency personnel
respond to a report
of an explosion outside CAAMS
Computer Services.
Owner Gary Wright had arrived
at his office at 10:25 A.M.
When I pulled into the parking lot, I
noticed that there was a piece of wood
over to the right-hand side,
near my secretary's car...
two 2x4s that appeared to be
nailed together.
I thought, "Well, it's just a piece of
scrap lumber from a construction project.
It's got nails
sticking out of it.
I should probably throw it away.
Somebody will step on it.
It'll get run over."
But as I bent down to pick it
up, there was a slight click,
and instantly I could feel this huge pressure
in my chest like almost a crushing pressure.
And I heard what sounded like
a fighter jet going over.
At that point, I didn't know
that it had been a bomb.
What I honestly thought is that
someone had shot me with a shotgun.
I began to think,
"Well, I may not make it."
The explosion has severed nerves
in Wright's left arm
and impaled more than 200
pieces of shrapnel in his body.
Investigators quickly determine
that Gary Wright
has just become the latest
victim of the Unabomber,
a shadowy figure who's been engaged in a campaign
of terror across the country for nine years.
The case we call Unabomb
actually began in may of 1978
and continued until the last bomb was
delivered in the U.S. mail in April of 1995.
And during that time, Unabomber
placed or mailed 16 devices.
The first device explodes at Northwestern
University, just north of Chicago.
Disguised as an
ordinary package,
the bomb inflicts minor injuries
on a university police officer.
A year later, Northwestern
is hit a second time.
When another package detonates on campus,
graduate student John G. Harris sustains cuts
on his arms and burns
around his eyes.
Then, on November 15, 1979, a bomb is placed in
the cargo hold of American Airlines flight 444,
heading from Chicago
to Washington, D.C.
In mid-flight, it sets off
a smoldering fire.
12 passengers suffer
smoke inhalation.
The pilots were able to land the plane at
Dulles, shortly before they said to us later
that it would have probably burned through the
hydraulics and dropped the plane out of the sky.
Authorities now begin to suspect
the bombings are linked.
All doubt is removed
seven months later.
A suspicious package arrives at the home of
Percy Wood, the President of United Airlines.
The subsequent explosion inflicts cuts and
burns over large portions of Wood's body.
Now, come 1980, we know
we have a serial bomber,
and so the FBI started working
as a joint task force
with ATF and, because we had bombs in the
mail, with the Postal Inspection Service.
The task force dubs
the investigation Unabomb.
Unabomb... universities
and airline bombings...
because those first four bombs were either affiliated
with university locations or with airlines.
From the beginning, the investigation
is hampered by a lack of evidence.
The Unabomber's devices
are relatively crude,
making it difficult to trace
them back to their maker.
There wasn't a lot of evidence left, and
the evidence that we could identify...
matches, pieces of wood, nails... were
the kind of things that you could buy
at any hardware store.
We started calling him early
the Junkyard Bomber,
because, in fact, he would make
these bombs from scratch.
He didn't go buy components and buy
pieces of metal and that type of thing.
He went out to piles of old
abandoned cars to carve off
chrome to use in his bomb
construction.
He used scraps of wood.
Well, everything you find at a bomb
scene... every single piece of evidence...
is critical because, for one, you have
to decide how the device functioned.
And in finding out how the device functioned,
you look if there's a circuitry involved,
where, in most of his devices,
he createdthe circuitry.
And it was not through a timer
like many bombers use.
He actually took the time to create the
mechanism, to create the circuits,
and that made it really
difficult for investigators.
He built his own switches
for the bombs from hickory.
And when he bought batteries, he would peel off
the cover of those batteries so we wouldn't
be able to go back and trace where those
batteries might have been purchased.
There was no evidence that would lend itself
to take us to a particular manufacturer,
vendor, sales documents, a
person's name on a purchase order.
There wasn't anything like that
connected with the devices.
But as the attacks continued, the bombs
became more sophisticated and more lethal.
A pipe bomb mailed to the head of the computer
department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville
explodes when it's opened
by a secretary.
She sustains severe burns to her hands
and shrapnel wounds to her body.
Two months later, at the University
of California, Berkeley,
a package explodes when engineering
professor Diogenes Angelakos picks it up.
He, too, suffers severe burns
and shrapnel wounds.
Usually in bombings, or in any kind of serial
crime, you can look at what they call victimology.
And you try and determine,
perhaps, people or businesses
or something that all of the victims had
in common with the suspect, or the person
who's doing the bombings
in this case.
With Unabomb, none of these people, none of the
victims over the years, had any connections.
Did they go to the same
universities,
did they have difficulty with one person, and was
there a commonality between all the victims?
And that was very difficult, because
we had literally hundreds and hundreds
of suspects.
There are no
incidents for almost two years.
Then, on May 15, 1985, engineering student
and aspiring astronaut John E. Hauser
is nearly killed when he picks up a parcel left
in a computer room on the U.C. Berkeley campus.
Zap!
And exploded, blew my arm off
to the side like this.
And the first thing I thought
was, "Why did they do that?"
Six months later, a package mailed to
the home of a University of Michigan
Psychology professor explodes
when research assistant
Nicklaus Suino opens it.
Suino sustains burns
and shrapnel wounds.
The professor suffers
some hearing loss.
One month later,
on December 11, 1985,
the Unabomber claims his first
fatality with his 11th bomb.
Computer-rental store owner
Hugh Scrutton is killed
when he picks up what appears
to be a piece of scrap wood.
Metal shrapnel penetrates his heart
and tears off his right hand.
This bomb contains a clue that had become
known as the Unabomber's signature...
a metal plate stamped
with the letters "F.C."
"F.C." became one of the standard ways
of us being able to tie in one bombing
with another and, over the years, became one of
the giveaways that this was a Unabomb device.
But the "F.C." signature shed no light
on the identity of the Unabomber
or even if he was
only one person.
Throughout the investigation,
one of the main questions was,
"Is this a lone actor, or is
there a group involved?"
There wasn't clear evidence one way
or the other for quite a while.
Finally, on February 20, 1987, investigators got
their first break with the Gary Wright bombing.
One of my employees had
actually seen a person place
this device outside in the parking lot
about 25 minutes prior to when I arrived.
He stared at her, emotionless, and once he
was done pulling the device out of the bag
and setting it there,
simply got up and walked away.
The result of the employee's description was this
now-famous composite sketch of the suspect...
a white male wearing aviator
sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt.
This was the first time that anybody
knew what the Unabomber looked like.
For all these years prior
to that, nobody knew.
But another
nine years would pass before
the Unabomber was actually identified, and the
truth would be stranger than anyone ever imagined.
After nine years and 12 attacks, the
FBI finally had a physical description
of the mystery man known as the Unabomber,
but the psychological profiles were mixed.
One said he was a young college
student, possibly still a teenager.
Another had him as a white-collar
professional, living with his mother.
The reality was
very, very different.
The Unabomber was, in fact,
a brilliant middle-aged
mathematician who had abandoned
a promising academic career to
live like a hermit in this cabin
in the Montana wilderness.
His name was Ted Kaczynski.
He was extremely smart
but socially awkward.
In retrospect, we would have to
consider a diagnosis such as
Asperger's Syndrome, where he had a hard time
reading clues of other people's emotions.
Theodore "Ted"
Kaczynski was born on May 22,
1942, to a working-class family
in Chicago, Illinois.
The older of two brothers,
he excelled academically.
In the fifth grade,
tests indicated that his I.Q.
was 167... genius level.
As he was so smart, he skipped two grades, which
then made him even more socially awkward,
because now he was with students
two years older than him.
In high school, the shy, young genius set his
sights on the best... Harvard University.
He was only 16 when he went
to Harvard.
He came from a very modest background, and in
Harvard, it's a very snobby kind of environment
and he was also socially maladjusted,
so it was a disaster for him.
At Harvard,
Kaczynski was one of 22
student volunteers picked to take part in a
personality study of gifted undergraduates.
What the participants didn't
know was that the study was
allegedly part of a secret program funded
by the CIA and military intelligence.
What they did was
essentially interview these kids
and put them up against someone
who ridiculed them mercilessly.
Now, this is something that if
you do that to someone who's
not socially confident anyway, it's going to
be very, at the least, difficult to deal with.
Some experts later surmised that the Harvard
experiments might have played a role
in Kaczynski's emotional
problems.
I think they took advantage
of a young, very vulnerable
person as a subject, and they
really treated him badly.
I mean, they really, you know,
played games with their mind.
Kaczynski graduated
from Harvard in 1962.
He enrolled at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where he earned his PhD
in Mathematics at age 24.
In 1967, he became an assistant professor
at the University of California, Berkeley,
teaching undergrad courses
in Calculus and Geometry.
He was the youngest professor
ever hired by the university,
but Kaczynski was not popular
with his students.
He didn't get very good ratings
as a teacher at Berkeley.
He was very uninvolved
with the students,
rather contemptuous of them and their
miniscule intellects, compared to his own.
During this time, Kaczynski was growing increasingly
disillusioned with contemporary society.
This was someone who was
deeply disturbed.
And if you can't deal with society
as it is... or people as they are...
how are you going to deal with
a society that's changing?
It was when he was at Ann Arbor that he
started fantasizing about killing people
who were tools of
the industrial society.
But by the time he went to
Berkeley, he was already
determining that he was going to
work for a couple of years,
save up money, and then go move out to the
woods and just drop out of society altogether.
In 1969, Kaczynski abruptly
resigned his teaching position.
He later bought land in a rural area near
Lincoln, Montana, and hand-built a new home...
this 10-by-12-foot cabin without
electricity or running water.
He soon realized, however, that even in the
wilderness, he could not avoid society.
It would infuriate him when
he'd be out in this wilderness
area and people would come
through on snowmobiles.
It infuriated him that these planes
would fly over where he was.
He would actually take his .22 and try to shoot
at a plane at about 40,000 feet because it's like
he couldn't get away from society
and technical things like that.
And so I think all those things
are what drove him to kind of
retaliate against society which
wouldn't leave him alone.
Mr. Kaczynski was alienated
from society.
And once he made up his mind to start killing
people, he used all his intelligence to do it.
Kaczynski started
his bombing campaign in 1978.
His first devices were somewhat
crude and ineffectual.
Over the years,
he perfected his techniques.
Kaczynski kept meticulous notes and
apparently followed his own exploits
through newspaper accounts, producing a
chilling record of a man obsessed by killing.
In reference to the primitive bomb left
on campus at Northwestern University,
he wrote, "I hoped that a student would pick it
up and would blow his hands off or get killed."
After his second bomb caused
minor injuries, he complained,
"I had hoped that the victim would be blinded or
have his hands blown off or be otherwise maimed.
I wish I knew how to get hold
of some dynamite."
As you go through some of the
writings that he had written
over the years, he makes it very clear that, "My
ambition is to kill a scientist, a businessman.
I'd even like to kill a government
official or a Communist."
He complained again, after the 1982 bomb
that injured the secretary at Vanderbilt,
"No indication that
she was permanently disabled.
Frustrating that I can't seem
to make a lethal bomb."
Finally, after the attack that
killed computer-rental store
owner Hugh Scrutton, Kaczynski
wrote in triumph, "Excellent.
Humane way to eliminate
somebody.
He probably never felt a thing."
For nine years, the
Unabomber had evaded capture,
outwitting law enforcement by using
low-tech methods and staying off the grid.
But after he was spotted in the Salt Lake City
parking lot in 1987, he seemed to vanish.
It's been a year
since the Unabomber
left his angry mark of death.
After he committed that bombing, and
that composite was circulated in 1987,
he dropped out of sight
for six years.
He could have been incarcerated,
he could have had health issues,
but, you know, you also have to realize that
it was the first time ever, since 1978,
that he had ever been seenplacing a device,
so it could have been because he was fearful
that he would be caught.
The Unabomber, from 1987
to 1993, did nothing.
People thought he was dead.
But what he was doing, he was really
learning how to build better bombs.
It wasn't until June of 1993
that the Unabomber surfaced again, sending
a letter to The New York Times, saying,
"We're the terrorist group F.C.
We have more to say,
and we'll get back in touch
with you later."
"F.C." apparently
stood for "Freedom Club."
Theodore Kaczynski's assertion that it was a
terrorist group was another misdirection.
"F.C." would now take
responsibility for a renewed
wave of attacks.
That same month, the Unabomber
finally struck again.
The package bomb blew as Dr. Charles Epstein
opened his mail at his home, late Tuesday.
Charles Epstein was a renowned geneticist from
the University of California, San Francisco.
Epstein is recovering from four hours
of surgery to his hands, arm, and face.
News of the bombing hit hard for
previous victim Gary Wright.
I came home from work, the
news was on, and he was back.
It unglued me.
It was just devastating.
Two days later and 3,000 miles away, another
bomb arrived at the office of David Gelernter,
a Computer Science professor
at Yale University.
I just heard
a very loud explosion.
And then we heard a man
screaming.
Gelernter survived
but was seriously injured.
Why would anyone want to blow
up a professor who specializes
in the languages used
to program computers?
The Unabomber was back in action, and
investigators were no closer to finding him
than they'd been when he
started, 15 years earlier.
The Unabomber... he was obsessed with ensuring
that he threw us off the trail forensically,
and so he would do
a number of things.
The return addresses on the Unabomb devices were
real names of real people at real addresses
of, say, their home or place
of business.
Others were a location that actually
existed but actually a phony address.
There was no such business
at that particular address.
And still others were meant
to mock the FBI.
For example, on one of the
letters the Unabomber sent,
the address was 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue
Northwest in Washington, D.C., which, of course,
is the address of the
J. Edgar Hoover FBI building.
In one of his letters, he said,
"The FBI is a joke.
The FBI will not be catching us
anytime soon."
The FBI, of course, had no idea about the Unabomber's
identity or whereabouts, and Ted Kaczynski
took great pains to make sure
he didn't leave a single clue.
He would take files, and he would file
everything down after he built something
so that he could ensure that he
was getting rid of fingerprints.
He was obsessed about leaving
fingerprint evidence.
Kaczynski also planted false clues to
throw investigators off the trail.
He went to a bathroom at the bus
station in Missoula, Montana,
and he actually took hairs off
the floor of the restroom.
And then, in subsequent bombs, he would take those
hairs and put them in between layers of tape.
And the whole idea was, when
those subsequent bombs exploded
at a crime scene, that we would think that hair
might have something to do with the Unabomber.
When he was out on a run to collect information
or to collect components for his bombs,
he would make sure he had
a disguise.
He'd put cotton up his nose so
his nostrils would look bigger.
He had a fake mustache
that he had worn.
For another 18 months,
everything was quiet.
Then, on December 10, 1994, the
Unabomber claimed his second fatality.
The latest victim was advertising
executive Thomas Mosser.
In all, 16 bombs in 17 years at
locations all over the United States.
Thomas Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent
to his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
As it turned out, Mosser had
been targeted because Kaczynski
mistakenly believed that he had
helped Exxon clean up its public
image after
the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Just over three months later, the Unabomber's
reign of terror was suddenly overshadowed
by a much more
destructive blast.
On the morning of April 19th, we all get
the call there's been a terrible bombing
in Oklahoma City.
So we're really focused on this, at this
point, because everybody's going to be asking,
"Is this the Unabomber?"
And we gave our best assessment
then that we didn't think it was,
because these are different personalities,
these are different types of bombings.
One is specific targeted,
the other is a mass murder.
Any thought that the Unabomber was responsible
for Oklahoma City was quickly erased,
when Timothy McVeigh was arrested
two days after the blast.
Ted Kaczynski, it seems, had his
own agenda and his own timetable.
When the Oklahoma City
bombing was happening,
Theodore Kaczynski was already
on a bus, on his way to deliver
the package for sending
to his next victim.
On April 24th, just five days after Oklahoma
City, a mail bomb killed Gilbert Murray,
President of the California Forestry
Association, a timber-industry lobbying group.
In an earlier incarnation, the group had
been targeted by radical environmentalists.
The bomb that was sent to the Forestry Association
was actually sent to his predecessor...
a man named William Dennison.
But he had retired, and
Mr. Murray had replaced him.
The Unabomber was very proud
of himself.
It didn't matter that his bomb
had killed the wrong man.
They were engaged in the same kind of work,
which was anti-environment, in his opinion,
and so it was okay.
I've been to a number of bomb scenes over
my career, and the last one, in Sacramento,
was probably one of
the more horrific.
The shrapnel is usually what
maims or kills the victim.
Most of the cases, nails,
staples, and screws were used.
That's an antipersonnel device.
That's used to maim or kill.
When you go to those crime scenes or when you
see the devastation that was left behind,
and then you read about what he says and how he
felt about those bombs, it's really chilling.
It's chilling that someone can think like that,
behave like that, and do that kind of thing.
By now, the Unabomber had been
at large for almost 17 years.
We talk about lone actors a lot and
how difficult they are to catch.
The Unabomber was the lone wolf
in the most classic sense.
Socially, he defined himself
as a social cripple.
But technologically...
ironically, because he was
so anti-technology...
he absolutely had utmost confidence in his
ability to keep from blowing himself up.
Nobody's ever seen anybody
like Theodore Kaczynski.
By the time the Unabomber claims his third
fatality, his bombs have become more effective,
and investigators still have
no idea who is responsible.
But with the death of Gilbert Murray of
the California Forestry Association,
the case suddenly takes
a surprising turn.
Within days, the Unabomber sent letters
to several people and claimed credit
for the Murray bombing and started talking about
the notion that the terrorist group F.C. is
going to send out a manifesto and
wants either The New York Times
or The Washington Post
to publish that manifesto.
And if, in fact, they do, the terrorist group
F.C. will desist from committing terrorist acts.
Two months later, the Unabomber
sends a 35,000-word manuscript
to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
Bob Guccione at Penthouse Magazine, among others.
Titled "Industrial Society
& Its Future,"
the essay becomes known
as "The Unabomber Manifesto."
There were many people who
thought "The Unabomb Manifesto"
was a red herring.
I had a couple of agents
come to my office and say,
"We're wasting too much time
on 'The Unabomber Manifesto.'
We need to stick with forensics.
We need to stick
with known facts."
Most people in the FBI never
even read the manifesto.
The popular opinion was that it was
nonsense, it was just scribbling.
The media and the
FBI are faced with a dilemma.
Publishing the manifesto could be seen
as giving in to terrorist demands.
The last thing we wanted to do is set a
precedent that we would be blackmailed
into publishing terrorist manifestos, because
every terrorist could come out of the woodwork
and decide, "This is nice.
We'll try this, too."
Attorney General Janet Reno called us to a
meeting, and essentially what we said to her was,
"The reason you should publish this is,
somebody out there has seen these words before,
and they're going to
recognize him by his words."
The Washington Post publishes the
manifesto on September 19, 1995.
After the publication of
"The Unabomber Manifesto,"
we received almost 55,000 calls.
We had wives turning in their husbands, we
had girlfriends turning in their boyfriends,
we had all kinds of people submitting
written samples of people's work.
Among the thousands of people who believe they
recognize the style of the writer is Linda Patrik,
the wife of Ted Kaczynski's
brother, David.
David Kaczynski's wife was on sabbatical in
Paris and saw some excerpts from the manifesto.
She recognized his phrasing
because David had showed her
letters from Ted and told her
about Ted's preoccupations.
I think it's partly that the voice
in the manifesto is a Chicago voice.
Phrases or just the grammar,
perhaps.
The Kaczynski brothers have been
estranged for several years.
When David reads the manifesto, he
must confront a sobering realization.
David recognized, in the manifesto,
echoes of his brother's wording.
David said that one thing that
really, really struck him was
seeing the term
"coolheaded logicians."
He said that's directly
out of Ted's mouth.
There was a strain of Ted's
philosophy in every paragraph.
So it was just becoming
impossible
for them to not push it further.
Through a lawyer, David
Kaczynski contacts the FBI.
He submits a copy of an essay that Ted had
written in 1971 to compare to the manifesto.
It was very clear to me
by the third paragraph,
when the hair on the back of my neck stood up,
what I was reading, which was a 1971 essay,
was identical in many ways
to the manifesto.
The biggest problem for David was, he was
afraid that if the government came to suspect
Ted Kaczynski on their own, they would storm the
cabin and Ted would be killed in the encounter.
He wanted to prevent
more violence.
He didn't want anybody else
to die.
David's information
leads authorities to Ted's
Montana cabin, which is put
under surveillance.
The FBI proceeds with caution, to ensure that any
evidence they obtain is admissible in court,
but they're also in a race
against time.
Now there was some real urgency because we
knew this is the primary time, over the years,
that the Unabomber had hit the
road and started mailing devices.
So we were very concerned that
while we're trying to put all of
this together, he could actually get out, get
on a bus, and go and deliver another bomb.
Then, just as the task force is putting
its plan in place, word leaks out
and kicks the operation
into overdrive.
And Dan Rather
called Louis Freeh,
the director of the FBI,
and said,
"We have information about
who your Unabomb suspect is.
It's a guy in Montana
in a cabin."
And Louis said, "Wait.
Give us 24 hours."
CBS News told the FBI director, "We had
planned on going to the air tonight
with this information."
They said,
"Well, we can hold off
unless the competition
finds out."
With the clock ticking, the
authorities close in on Kaczynski.
And when the news breaks,
it's on the FBI's terms.
A few hours ago, U.S. law-enforcement
agents took into custody a Montana man
suspected of being
the mysterious Unabomber.
While the Unabomb task force scrambles to obtain
a search warrant on Ted Kaczynski's cabin,
dozens of agents descend
upon Lincoln, Montana.
Between noon on April 2nd
and midnight on April 2nd,
we flew about 150 people from
San Francisco into Montana
on the last two flights out
and got everybody in position.
We chose some members of our S.W.A.T. team to
do work in the mountains, to cut off any places
where Kaczynski might run.
We were worried that there
would be nothing in the cabin
and therefore no evidence,
and be back at square one.
By the next morning, the arrest
team is ready to move in.
With the help of a local forestry agent,
Kaczynski is lured from his cabin
and taken into custody
without incident.
After 16 attacks, 26 victims, and almost 18 years,
the hunt for the Unabomber is finally over.
Theodore Kaczynski never
expected any law enforcement
would get anywhere near his cabin in
Montana, and it's a good thing he didn't,
because he would have booby-trapped
that thing and blown it sky-high.
Investigators carefully
begin to search the cabin.
The cabin smelled inside.
He had a bathroom that he literally had
to dig into the floor of the cabin.
There was no running water.
There was no electricity.
Theodore Kaczynski himself
smelled terribly
and probably hadn't taken a
shower for a long, long time...
in fact, probably not since his last bombing run,
because there was no place to take a shower.
This was not
your Lake Tahoe chalet.
Inside the tiny 10-by-12-foot structure
lies a treasure trove of evidence.
The cabin was a bomb factory.
There were all kinds
of containers.
And in those containers, he had
essentially handmade bomb components.
In one container, he had extra switches...
those hickory switches...
some of which we found
at crime scenes.
He had containers that had formulas on
them, and we came to find out later,
these were mixtures of where
he had experimented.
And there were a number
of notebooks.
Those notebooks contain what
came to be over 30,000 pages of
handwritten notes, because all
of those years he had spent
in the cabin, he had been
keeping journals.
He had been keeping copious notes of everything
he'd done and of all his bomb experiments.
But he threw us a curve,
because, when we went to go
through those notes, several hundred pages
of them were written in a mathematical code.
When we sent all this back to
the FBI lab, they said,
"This mathematical code is
probably more complicated
than anything we've seen since the height
of the Cold War from the KGB itself."
During the search of his cabin,
investigators discover that Kaczynski
had no intention of stopping
his campaign of terror.
They found a live device
underneath his bunk.
It turned out that he, as we
had surmised, was not going to
honor his promise not to send
any more bombs.
This thing was ready to go.
All it needed was the address and the
postage, and it would have been gone.
A federal grand jury indicts Ted Kaczynski on
multiple counts of illegally transporting,
mailing, and using bombs.
The government will also seek the death
penalty for the murders of Hugh Scrutton,
Thomas Mosser,
and Gilbert Murray.
Faced with overwhelming evidence tying
him to the Unabomber crimes, Kaczynski's
court-Appointed lawyers attempt to enter an
insanity defense to save him from execution.
Kaczynski adamantly objects.
He distrusts any
mental-health professionals.
He thinks that they do
mind control.
And he's very proud of his
rational reasoning ability.
And the idea that he was any way
affected with any kind
of mental illness would go just
to the heart of who he was.
Mr. Kaczynski had a very, very strong belief
that he did not want to be labeled mentally ill.
Number one, he did not believe
he wasmentally ill.
And, number two, he did not want
to taint his philosophical view,
where he was trying to influence the public,
as being discarded as the ravings of a madman.
He would prefer the death penalty,
rather than being labeled mentally ill.
As his trial date approaches, Kaczynski tries
to get his court-appointed lawyers dismissed.
The judge said, "No, we will
not let you have different
attorneys, because it would take at least three
months for new attorneys to get up to speed.
We've already impaneled the juries, we've
brought witnesses in from around the country,
we've brought victims in."
So then Kaczynski said, "In
that case, I'll defend myself,
pro se, and I don't need three
months to get up to speed."
And at that point, the judge
said, "No, I won't allow it."
Kaczynski, that night, attempted to hang
himself in his jail cell with his underpants.
The suicide attempt, along
with other factors,
prompts the judge to order an examination
by forensic psychiatrist Sally Johnson.
Dr. Johnson diagnoses Kaczynski as
suffering from paranoid schizophrenia,
but declares him
competent to stand trial.
The defense experts, and Sally Johnson,
who was neutral, who had no ax to grind,
concluded that he actually
was psychotic.
And her diagnosis of him being
psychotic caused the government
to be willing to allow him to plead guilty
and take the death penalty off the table.
He had two choices. He either took the plea
bargain or we went ahead with the trial.
And then we felt we were
required to and we were going to
present evidence
of mental condition.
And the idea of that was so devastating
to him that he'd rather plead guilty.
In January 1998, Kaczynski
agrees to a plea agreement,
under which he pleads guilty
and is sentenced to life
in prison without
the possibility of parole.
He was willing to accept the death penalty
rather than to besmirch his philosophy.
But given the choice of pleading guilty and
avoiding the death penalty, he chose to take it.
On January 22, 1998, Theodore Kaczynski,
A.K.A. the Unabomber, is sentenced to
life in prison without parole.
During his sentencing hearing, some of his
victims are allowed to address him directly.
I didn't see any contrition or
any sort of guilt on his face.
I only saw shock when I told him
that I forgave him.
And then that was the point
I knew that I had him.
Designated a domestic terrorist by the FBI,
Ted Kaczynski is currently incarcerated
at the Super Max facility
in Fremont County, Colorado.
In some ways, he probably does a lot better
there, in that extremely structured environment,
than he ever did when he was living
up in the wilderness up in Montana.
And as he always had problems dealing with other
people, the fact that he's isolated from them
is probably not as difficult for him as
it would be for a lot of other people.
Kaczynski's cabin was seized as
evidence and removed from the property.
It is now on display at the
Newseum in Washington, D.C.
On August 10, 2006,
Judge Garland Burrell Jr.
Ordered that the personal items
confiscated from the cabin be
sold at auction and that the
proceeds go to the bombing victims.
The auction raised
over $232,000.
Ted Kaczynski's brother, David, received the
$1 million reward for the Unabomber's capture.
After paying his legal expenses, he donated
the rest of the reward money to the families
of his brother's victims.
He said, "I know I could have had my brother's
blood on my hands through an execution,
but I couldn't have had innocent
people's blood on my hands."
After the trial, Gary Wright and
David developed a close friendship.
They have appeared together at
numerous speaking engagements.
We speak on
social-justice issues.
We speak on healing and
forgiveness and stuff like that.
People are always saying, "Wow.
That's such an unlikely
friendship."
David Kaczynski no longer speaks
publicly about his brother's crimes.
He is currently the executive director of
a Tibetan monastery in upstate New York.
Three people were killed
outright by Kaczynski's bombs.
23 other people were injured,
some severely maimed.
But investigators never discovered a
definitive pattern to the Unabomber's victims.
You never really fully come
to terms with understanding why
he would do this... why he would pick such
random victims, in some respects, and, you know,
and do the things that he did.
You and I would never think
that way.
Ted Kaczynski, like Timothy McVeigh, was a
game changer with respect to terrorism.
If we go to a federal office
building or if we get our mail,
these are places
where we expect safety.
And, indeed, the Postal Service
changed their methods
for accepting and transporting packages
and mail, due to Ted Kaczynski.
Chief among the
changes in postal security
is the requirement that packages
weighing more than 13 ounces
be mailed in person at a post office,
rather than placed in a mailbox.
But beyond the security measures, the biggest
impact of Kaczynski's campaign of terror
has been on the victims.
In the years since the bombings, at
least four have died of natural causes,
but others still bear the scars,
both physical and emotional.
You will never be the same.
You accept it.
You will never have closure.
There is no such a word
as "closure."
Closure does not exist.
Life is different.
Now you get to choose what
you're gonna do with it.
You can be bitter, you can be
angry, or you can be happy.
And those are your choices.
While some of Ted Kaczynski's
victims have managed to move on,
it seems that Kaczynski himself
never will.
Ted Kaczynski has absolutely
no feelings of remorse
or sympathy or regret or
anything for any of his victims.
They were all soldiers of the technological
society, as far as he was concerned.
He had a higher purpose, and
they were immaterial to him.