- [Narrator] When a
brilliant mind is used for
doing something bad rather than good,
the consequences that follow
could be extremely damaging or even fatal.
Furthermore, when that very
same mind has undergone
a psychological experiment
where some participants
came out altered on many levels,
it could be assumed
that it might have been
a contributing factor for
how Theodore Ted Kaczynski
would later become known as the Unabomber.
(dramatic music)
Ted Kaczynski was known to
be wise beyond his years.
He was said to have been very quiet
and didn't socialize much,
and through the eyes of
his younger brother David,
Ted was extremely awkward and withdrawn,
recalling times when Ted
would run up to their attic
to hide when house guests would arrive.
Their mother once told David
"never abandon Ted, because
that's what he fears the most."
She believed his odd behavior stemmed from
being hospitalized as a
baby for several days,
feeling as though that had caused Ted
to have deep-rooted abandonment issues.
Also described as hyper-intelligent,
he was academically more
advanced than his peers,
and before he would
even turn 16 years old,
Ted was accepted to Harvard
University on a scholarship.
Whether he was ready for it or not,
he soon found himself as a young freshman
at a top Ivy League school.
While there, Ted happened upon
a psychological experiment
under the hands of Dr. Henry Murray,
a Harvard professor who had previously
trained spies for the
CIA during World War II.
The participants of the Murray experiment
had gotten very little information as to
what the experiment entailed apart from
what was worded in the
announcement for volunteers,
which stated "would you
be willing to contribute
to the solution of certain
psychological problems,
pars on an ongoing program of research
in the development of personality,
by serving as a subject
in a series of experiments
or taking a number of tests,
average about two hours a
week, though the academic year
at the current college rate per hour?"
Without any warning about the severity
that the test subjects would endure,
Ted decided to volunteer.
At the beginning of the experiment,
Ted and 21 other participants were asked
to write an essay on
their philosophy of life.
Once the essay was turned in,
Murray took each subject
into a brightly-lit room
and sat them in front of a one-way mirror
with electrodes attached to their heads
to monitor their responses
to what would come next.
Thinking they'd be debating
their points of view,
the subjects were instead
met with demeaning,
high-stress, and intense interrogation.
It was reported that "the
intent was to catch them
by surprise, to deceive
them, and to brutalize them."
(tense music)
To preserve their anonymity,
the 22 undergraduate
participants were only
referred to by code names.
Kaczynski was referred to
as his code name Lawful.
While being taped, they were
systematically destroyed
with the information they
had provided in their essay
by a law student who had been
prepped to inflict the abuse.
Their ideas and values were ridiculed
and they were torn down
to their wit's end.
Session after session,
they were challenged,
humiliated, and forced
to watch their character
be degraded through playbacks
of previously taped sessions,
all in an effort to push
them to their breaking point.
(tense music)
Murray himself referred to
the subjects' questioning
as "vehement, sweeping, and
personally abusive" attacks.
The experiment was aimed at exploring
how far a person could
withstand interrogation,
but proved to be
mind-altering and damaging
to a number of its human test subjects.
Some believe that this was the cause
of Ted's hostility towards technology.
He'd even later state with certainty
that it was in 1962 that
he'd become against it,
the same year the experiment ended,
and the year Kaczynski
graduated from Harvard.
After Harvard, Ted attended
the University of Michigan
where he earned a doctoral
degree in mathematics.
After receiving his
Ph.D. he went on to teach
at the University of
California at Berkeley
for a short period of
time, and eventually moved
to Great Falls, Montana in 1971.
(tense music)
It seemed he wanted to
get away from the world,
becoming a recluse,
living in a cabin he built
on a piece of land that he
and his brother David owned.
The cabin only measured 10 by 12 feet
and had no telephone, heat,
electricity, or running water,
and his closest neighbor
was 10 miles away.
After Ted would not allow
David to build a home
for himself on their shared
property in Great Falls,
David ended up building a cabin
in a secluded part of western Texas
where he lived for eight years.
He would correspond by mail with Ted
frequently during this time.
When later interviewed,
David reported that
he saw his time away from society
as more of a spiritual journey
and a time for self-discovery
whereas Ted viewed his time
in isolation as "all about
getting away from the collective
mess of the modern world."
David explains "you could
call the difference between us
one between the left
brain and the right brain.
Ted was hyper-analytical.
It's curious that he
rejected technology because
his way of thinking was very
scientific, very binary."
Alone as he wished, Ted
now spent most of his time
borrowing books from the local library,
and began writing a manuscript
which later became known
as the Unabomber Manifesto.
Some time went by, and in 1977,
he began writing rage-filled
letters to his parents,
claiming that they never loved him.
A year later, in 1978,
Ted relocated to the city
where he took a job at his
brother's factory in Chicago.
The move wouldn't last long,
as Ted began harassing a woman at work,
going so far as to
write lewd and offensive
rhymes about her on the
walls of the factory.
David was forced to fire Ted.
(tense music)
While his work at the
factory came to an end,
Ted was just getting started
terrorizing the country.
In May of 1978, during
Ted's time in Chicago,
the first of many of
his packages was sent.
The prototype was found at
the University of Illinois
at Chicago and then brought
to Northwestern University,
located just outside of
Chicago in Evanston, Illinois.
The address on the package indicated
it could be returned to one
of the professors there.
The package detonated at
Northwestern University,
injuring a security guard.
(tense music)
Ted Kaczynski's revolution
against the industrial system
was underway.
(dramatic music)
One year later, in May of 1979,
Kaczynski would send another
bomb to Northwestern,
this time injuring a graduate student.
Months down the road, another
package containing a bomb
exploded in the cargo hold on
an American Airlines flight,
causing injury to 12 on board.
With three bomb incidents and no suspect,
federal investigators
created the task force
dedicated specifically
to the airline case,
where it was attributed to the work
of the Unabomber by media outlets.
On June 10th, 1980,
another bomb was detonated
at the home of the president
of United Airlines,
Percy Wood, whose home was near Chicago.
With a second airline-related bombing,
the federal task force now
included members of ATF
and the United States
postal inspection service,
and was called UNABOM, U-N-A-B-O-M,
which was an acronym that stood for
University and Airline Bombing,
as those were the primary targets.
Eventually, the task force
was so large that it had
150 full time investigators,
analysts, and others
working to try to find the Unabomber.
His work was refined as
parcel after parcel went out.
Each was made with scrap materials
and with great precision,
making them extremely difficult
for investigators to trace.
(tense music)
Over the years to come,
more explosives were sent
to people who had ties to universities
and the aerotech industry,
some to their homes,
others to their workplace, which included
1981, the University of Utah,
1982, Vanderbilt University
and the University of
California at Berkeley.
In 1985, a second explosive was sent
to the University of
California a Berkeley,
along with the Boeing Company
in Auburn, Washington,
and the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor.
(tense music)
On December 11th, 1985,
the Unabomber would send
his first fatal package
to a computer store
in Sacramento, killing
the owner, Hugh Scrutton.
Following that computer store was another
in Salt Lake City on February 20th, 1987.
Another package was sent
and received by store owner
Gary Wright, who was
injured in the attack.
Wright's case would finally give
authorities some kind of lead.
An eyewitness was able to
give a vague description
of the person who might
have delivered the package,
providing investigators with
a sketch of the possible
perpetrator, a man in a hooded
sweatshirt with sunglasses.
Though it was not much,
the sketch would be
widely distributed to the public
in hopes of getting more information.
For years, investigators had
searched in vain for anything
they could find in the
recovered bomb components
and tried to mine the
victims' lives for any detail
that might help reveal
the Unabomber's identity.
The Unabomber's attacks
went silent for a while,
and he wouldn't reemerge
for another several years.
At this point, David was in a relationship
with a woman he was planning to marry,
and in 1989, Ted ceased all
communication with David
because he had a problem
with his relationship.
David had refused to call off his wedding,
which was reportedly the reason
Ted had cut all ties with his brother.
The bombings continued in 1993,
where targets based at the
University of California
at San Francisco and Yale
University were attacked.
The Unabomber's next
fatal attack took place
on December 10th, 1994,
after a bomb was sent
to the home of advertising
executive Thomas Mosser
in North Cadwell, New Jersey.
And on April 24th, 1995,
he'd send his final
fatal bomb to the
president of the California
Forestry Association, Gilbert P. Murray,
who was killed in his Sacramento office.
(tense music)
Still unable to calculate his methods,
investigators would soon learn
that the Unabomber's victims
were chosen completely
randomly from library research.
Within the same year, the case broke open
when authorities received
a 35,000-word manifesto
from the Unabomber which
explained his motives
and his take on the problems in society.
After heavily debating
the moral and safety
implications of publishing
the letter for the public,
FBI director Louis Freeh and
Attorney General Janet Reno
approved the manifesto appearing
in the Washington Post
and the New York Times
in hopes that someone
could identify the author.
Following the manifesto's publication,
thousands of readers
suggested new suspects,
including David, who feared
that the manifesto had a similar
writing style to his estranged
brother's previous work.
David's now-wife Linda
was the one who noticed
the similarities in the
writing style and informed him.
When David came to terms
with the possibility
that the man raining terror on the nation
might be his older brother Ted,
he was left conflicted
by this new reality.
(tense music)
One of his biggest dilemmas
about coming forward
was how their mother would
feel about him doing so.
Linda helped David work
through the emotional turmoil
of decided to reach
out to the authorities,
which he eventually did.
He provided federal
investigators with letters
and documents that Ted
had previously written
for linguistics experts to analyze.
(tense music)
After comparing and
scrutinizing the samples
supplied by David with
the Unabomber's manifesto,
experts were overwhelmingly sure
that Ted Kaczynski could be the culprit.
Furthermore, they learned
that Ted had worked
at the University of
California at Berkeley,
where two of the bombs had been placed
years after his departure
from his position there
and during the earlier parts
of the Unabomber's spree.
Combined with certain
facts comparing the nature
of the bombings with Ted
Kaczynski's life and beliefs,
along with analyzing
those documents was enough
for the courts to issue the
authorities a search warrant.
On April 3rd, 1996, with the tips provided
by David Kaczynski,
investigators were ultimately led
to Ted's Montana cabin,
where they found huge amounts
of evidence that could
be used to convict him.
The Unabomber was finally caught.
After arresting Ted,
investigators continued
to comb through his property.
The evidence they collected
from inside his cabin
included a large supply
of bomb components,
one live bomb that was ready for mailing,
40,000 pages of hand-written journals
that included bomb-making experiments,
descriptions of the Unabomber's crimes,
and descriptions of the targets.
In one of his pieces of writing,
he said of his killings,
"my motive for doing what I am going to do
is simply personal revenge."
They also found drafts of his manifesto.
(dramatic music)
Ted Kaczynski was brought
to court in California
and New Jersey, as
these were the locations
of his three fatal attacks, being charged
on 13 counts of bombing and murder.
He pleaded guilty in hopes of
avoiding the death penalty,
but was rejected by justice
department officials.
Before the trial, Ted was
suspected of trying to
commit suicide in prison
and had to undergo
a psychiatric evaluation
to judge his competence
to conduct his own defense at the trial.
A government psychiatrist and
the attorneys on both sides
came to agree that Kaczynski
was competent to stand trial
and that he had the right to
represent himself in court.
His lawyers wanted to claim
that he had the delusions
up a schizophrenic, but
Kaczynski refused to allow
that description to be attributed to him.
(tense music)
On January 22nd, 1997, Ted pleaded guilty
to being the Unabomber,
and was not allowed
to represent himself
without his attorneys.
Throughout his trial, he refused to show
any sign of remorse or penance.
On May 4th, 1997, Ted
Kaczynski was sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility
of parole or release, and is
housed in an isolated cell
in a supermax prison in Colorado.
To this day, which has
been well over 20 years,
after numerous letters and cards,
David has yet to hear back from Ted,
seemingly because he felt so betrayed.
Reportedly, when Ted found out that David
was the one who identified
him for federal authorities,
he said "that's
impossible, David loves me.
He'd never do that."
David cleared the air with his mother,
and finally told her that
he'd turned his brother in,
to which she replied "I
know that you love Ted
and wouldn't have done
that if you hadn't had to,"
leaving David feeling
reassured about his decision.
Even still, every so often,
David continues to write
to his brother to let him know
that he's always welcome to reach out.
David has written a book
about his experience
and his relationship with Ted,
and has become an advocate for
anti-death penalty activism,
and just as his mother
once told him not to,
David has yet to abandon
his big brother Ted.
(somber music)
