What the FBI Found Inside the Unabomber’s Montana Cabin

For roughly 25 years starting in the 1970s, Ted Kaczynski withdrew from modern society and lived in a tiny, primitive cabin near Lincoln, Mont., without electricity or running water. It was from there that he conducted most of his 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured nearly two dozen others.

When Kaczynski’s brother, David, suspected his sibling was the man behind the bombings, he led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Kaczynski’s 10-foot-by-14-foot cabin. Investigators arrested Kaczynski and searched the structure on April 3, 1996, uncovering a trove of evidence, including bomb-making materials, approximately 40,000 pages of handwritten journals, writings related to his manifesto and a completed bomb ready to be mailed. 

Those discoveries provided powerful evidence connecting Kaczynski to the Unabomber attacks and ultimately put him in prison for life. His attorneys saw the cabin as proof that Kaczynski was mentally unwell, that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was driven by mental illness, not criminal intent.

"I think it's a good indicator of how far this Harvard Ph.D. and Berkeley professor had fallen and how he was living and functioning," Quin Denvir, one of Kaczynski's defense lawyers, said in 1997, according to SF Gate.

The cabin, which was previously displayed at the now-closed Newseum in Washington, D.C., was reconstructed at FBI headquarters in 2020.

After completing his education, a 25-year-old Kaczynski became the youngest assistant professor in the history of the University of California at Berkeley. He was hired in 1967 to teach undergraduate geometry and calculus. Two years later, he resigned without explanation.

Kaczynski then returned to the Chicago area, to live with his parents for two years before he moved to the cabin he had built with David's help in 1971. The small, reddish wooden cabin was located in the woods outside of Lincoln, Mont., a town in the western part of the state with fewer than 1,000 residents. It was also on just more than an acre of land about a fourth of a mile up from Canyon Creek— an easy place to be isolated, constructed at the end of a muddy road, hidden amongst trees and several hundred yards from the nearest neighbor.

The construction of the cabin was bare: There was a single door, a single window and a single chimney peak. A hole cut into the floor served as a toilet. Kaczynski used an old potbellied stove to cook and constructed shelves that were neatly stacked with coffee, bottles and jars.

Kaczynski slept on a small platform bed and had a small table and chair, all of which he made out of wood. Outside the cabin were overflowing garbage cans. 

“Ted used candles with metal reflectors for light, and obtained water either from the nearby creek or, in winter, from melted snow,” David told the FBI, according to a transcript of the interview.

Kaczynski used the cabin to build and mail bombs but was also accused of sabotaging mining and logging equipment, booby-trapping dirt bike trails by stringing wires between trees and trashing nearby hunting cabins.

Those living in Lincoln knew him as a bearded loner who would ride his bicycle into town for supplies or long visits to the public library. 

“He was kind of a recluse—he kept to himself, never bothered anyone,” neighbor Dick Lundberg told the Associated Press in 1996. “He never did say anything bad about anybody. We thought he was all right.”

Many of Kaczynski’s personal items found in the cabin, including journals, clothing and a typewriter were auctioned off in 2011 and raised about $190,000 for his victims and their family members.

Investigators spent 13 days cataloging the contents of the cabin; the actual list of materials originally built by the FBI is 34 pages long. 

Items cataloged included more than 200 books neatly stacked around the cabin; the typewriter used to type identifiable Unabomber correspondence dating to 1982; a carbon copy of the manifesto; a handwritten autobiography that contains the statement that Kaczynski intended to start killing people;a .25-caliber handgun; ammunition and magazines; a gun-cleaning kit; seven maps; $32 in cash; documents mentioning the names and occupations of some Unabomber victims; and bomb components, including triggers, initiators, pipes and chemicals.

At the auction, Kaczynski's personal journals raised $40,676. His hoodie and sunglasses sold for $20,025, and his handwritten manifesto sold for $20,053. Other popular items included $22,003 for the Smith Corona typewriter used to write manifestos sent to newspapers.