30 Years Ago, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski Published the Manifesto That Led to His Capture

On May 25, 1978, a person found a package in a parking lot of the University of Illinois in Chicago. It was turned in and sent to the Northwestern University professor whose name was listed in the return address. But the professor did not recognize the package and called campus security. The package blew up when it was opened, injuring a security officer in the first known explosive package sent by the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

For the next 17 years, the Unabomber mailed increasingly sophisticated homemade explosive packages around the country while eluding authorities by keeping his identity secret and living in anonymity at a remote Montana cabin. 

Ted Kaczynski, a former UC Berkeley professor, was caught in 1996, after he sent 16 bombs, killing three people and injuring 23, in efforts targeting academics, computer experts and business executives working for universities, technology companies and airlines. UNABOM was the case name that the FBI gave to the bombing campaign–for Universities and Airline BOMing targets.

A year after the first attack, Northwestern University was targeted again. On May 9, 1979, a researcher was injured by a rigged cigar box that blew up in a study room. A few months later, a bomb detonated on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Several passengers suffered smoke inhalation, but there were no major injuries and the plane landed safely. In 1980, United Airlines President Percy Woods was hurt when he opened a package concealing an explosive within a book. 

Between 1981 and 1985, seven bombs wound up at universities around the country and a Boeing facility in Washington State. Some were safely detonated by authorities and while others caused injuries. 

The first fatality occurred on December 11, 1985. According to the Sacramento Bee, Hugh Campbell Scrutton, owner of RenTech Computer Rentals in Sacramento, stepped out the back door of his shop and into the parking lot. Moments later, a bomb placed behind the store exploded, hurling him 10 feet. He was hospitalized and died within hours.

Kaczinski sent bombs that caused injuries for the next nine years. New York City advertising executive Thomas Mosser was killed at home on December 10, 1994, when he opened a booby-trapped package, according to the New York Daily News.

The last bomb linked to Kaczinski was mailed on April 24, 1995, to the California Forestry Association, which lobbies for the timber industry, in Sacramento. Its new president, Gilbert Murray, was helping an employee open the package when it went off, killing Murray, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Kaczynski justified the violence by saying he thought it would save mankind from unfettered technology and lead to peace on Earth. He laid his beliefs bare in a 35,000-word manifesto he sent to The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The essay criticized modern technology as detrimental toward humanity and the environment and advocated for its elimination. Kaczynski insisted extreme measures were necessary to disrupt the existing system but promised to end his deadly campaign if either newspaper published his rant. 

After months of consideration, and with the FBI’s blessing amid hopes by agents that someone would recognize the author and tell authorities, both newspapers published the manuscript on September 19, 1995. Kaczynski, who had been meticulous in covering his tracks during his bombing campaign, apparently did not realize that his writing idiosyncrasies would do him in.

David Kaczynski recognized his brother’s writing and forwarded the FBI a 23-page essay that Ted wrote in 1971, echoing many of the same gripes listed in the manifesto. David credits his wife for highlighting the similarities between the two documents. The couple worked with a private investigator and former FBI behavioral science expert to assess whether Ted could be the Unabomber before contacting the FBI, The New York Times reported.

One phrase found in both the essay and the manifesto that jumped out at FBI special agent Terry Turchie: “sphere of human freedom.” That, along with other writing anomalies and evidence, helped authorities secure a search warrant for the tiny home with one window that Kaczynski had built in the wilds of Montana. 

“There were these containers, and they were labeled,” Turchie said on the In the FBI podcast. “And one was labeled with the chemical compound for potassium chlorate. And there was sodium chloride. …There was sugar and zinc and aluminum and lead and silver oxide—all these compounds had shown up in various UNABOM devices.” 

Turchie also explained that authorities found a “small manila envelope” containing “admissions and confessions to all 16 UNABOM crimes in detail.”

It was only after his identification and arrest that authorities pieced together a profile of Kaczynski and the public learned about who he was before he became the Unabomber.

He was extremely intelligent from a young age, graduated early from Evergreen Park Community High School in the Chicago area and was accepted to Harvard University at age 16. 

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Kaczynski earned a master’s and a doctorate at the University of Michigan. He then took a job as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1967. Kaczynski unexpectedly quit two years later and moved in with his parents. In 1971, he purchased a 1.4-acre plot of land in Montana and built the plywood and tar paper cabin with no running water near the small community of Lincoln, population of less than 1,000.

In an interview with the Lincoln-based news website Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, Kaczynski said, “Ever since my early teens, I had dreamed of escaping from civilization–as in going to live on an uninhabited island or in some other wild place.” Kaczynski rarely spoke to his family, preferring the path of a lone wolf.

Charming cabins near his were being replaced by “these fancy, pretentious, modern things that really look out of place in the woods,” he lamented. Kaczynski also complained about the constant building of new houses and “more roads put through the woods, more areas logged off, more aircraft flying over.”

Within a few years, he escalated to mailing his homemade pipe bombs to his perceived enemies of humanity. 

A central argument in Kaczynski’s manifesto is that technology trumps freedom and cannot be controlled, so it must be destroyed.

He came up with these ideas when technology like artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction. Modern AI models can now rewrite human code and refuse to shut themselves down, according to Judd Rosenblatt, an executive who works with companies developing this technology. 

Kaczynski’s manifesto transcends left/right pigeon-holing. Experts on both sides of the political spectrum have agreed with the kind of concerns he expressed about advancing technology and environmental destruction. 

In 2013, conservative commentator Keith Ablow wrote an opinion piece for Fox News titled “Was the Unabomber correct?” 

While stressing that Kaczynski was rightly convicted and imprisoned, he said the Unabomber was correct about the dangers of heavy societal reliance on technology. Ablow argued that Kaczynski’s work “deserves a place alongside Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell.” The novels depict dystopian futures with technology used to control citizens.

New York Magazine in 2018 profiled Kaczynski devotees, including one who questioned whether bombing a science department at a Chilean university would be a "fair target" and reasoned that "for Uncle Ted, it would have been, so I guess that's the standard." 

Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote Old King, a novel about Kaczynski, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that people who look up to the terrorist are “idolizing a con man.”

“He fit the ideals to suit the anger,” Loskutoff says. “And when you idolize someone who created an ideology out of hatred and rage, you're going to end up in that same place.” 

Soon after he was arrested, Kaczynski underwent a battery of psychological tests. He met the criteria for a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and his lawyers wanted to present an insanity defense. Kaczinski refused, declaring he was not crazy, according to CBS News.

He pled guilty to three counts of murder and multiple counts of transportation of an explosive device with intent to kill or injure and was sentenced in 1998 to life in prison without chance of parole. 

Kaczinski was sent to the ADX Supermax prison in Colorado, where he joined the former Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin Guzman and Richard Reid, the terrorist who boarded a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001 and unsuccessfully tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes. Kaczinski was later transferred to the Federal Medical Center in North Carolina.

He ultimately took responsibility for his actions, though he never forgave his brother for turning him in. David wrote to him in prison repeatedly, hoping Ted would respond. He didn’t.

Kaczynski had said that he preferred the death penalty over life in prison. On June 11, 2023, NBC News reported he used a shoelace as a makeshift noose and hung himself from the handicap railing in his room.