Ted Kaczynski

The sixth grade was the break. A test put his IQ at 167, his school in Evergreen Park moved him up a year, and a boy who had been a leader among his classmates spent the rest of his schooling as the youngest person in the room. He skipped eleventh grade too, graduated at 15, and entered Harvard at 16, the son of a Chicago sausage maker set loose among adults. In his second year he gave 200 hours to a study run by Henry Murray, in which a stranger attacked the beliefs each subject had been asked to write down, in terms Murray himself called vehement, sweeping and personally abusive. Michigan gave him a doctorate in 1967 for a dissertation his adviser called the best he had ever directed.

Berkeley made him its youngest assistant professor. He resigned on June 30, 1969, without explanation, and in 1971 moved into a cabin he built outside Lincoln, Montana, with no electricity or running water. Between 1978 and 1995 he sent bombs through the mail and left them in place. Three people died: Hugh Scrutton, a computer store owner in Sacramento, Thomas Mosser, a public relations executive in New Jersey, and Gilbert Murray, a timber industry lobbyist in California. Another 23 people were injured. The hunt for the man the FBI called the Unabomber cost more than 50 million dollars.

Linda Patrik read the manifesto first and told her husband it sounded like his brother. David Kaczynski did not want to believe her. He went through the family papers, found letters Ted had sent newspapers in the 1970s attacking technology in the same phrasing, and hired a lawyer to carry the material to the FBI. He asked for two things: that his name stay out of it, and that his brother not be executed. His name reached CBS News within days of the arrest, and the Justice Department sought the death penalty anyway. David took the 1 million dollars the FBI had posted as a reward, put it into a fund, and gave 630,000 dollars of it to the survivors and to the families of the three men Ted had killed. Ted never spoke to him again.

His own lawyers wanted to argue that he was insane. He fought them, tried to fire them, tried to kill himself in his cell, and then pleaded guilty on January 22, 1998, which ended the trial, took execution off the table and sent him to the federal supermax at Florence, Colorado for the rest of his life. In 2012 he answered his Harvard class's 50th reunion questionnaire with his occupation given as prisoner and eight life sentences given as awards. He stopped cancer treatment in March 2023 and died in federal custody in North Carolina on June 10, 2023. The cabin sits in an FBI museum. The manifesto is still circulating, claimed since by people he would not have recognized.

Ted Kaczynski's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Boundary Functions book
  Doctoral dissertation — won Michigan's prize for the best of the year 1967
• The cabin near Lincoln, Montana building
  Built by hand, without electricity or running water — now held by an FBI museum 1971
• Industrial Society and Its Future article
  The roughly 35,000-word manifesto, published by The Washington Post on September 19, 1995 1995
• Technological Slavery book
  Prison anthology collecting the manifesto, essays and letters 2010
• Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How book
  Written at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado 2016

• 1958 aged ~16 Enters Harvard at 16 on a scholarship He had skipped two grades and finished high school at 15.
• June 30, 1969 aged 27 Resigns from Berkeley without explanation The department chairman later called the resignation quite out of the blue.
• 1971 aged ~29 Moves into the cabin he built outside Lincoln, Montana No electricity, no running water, odd jobs and money from his family.
• May 25, 1978 aged 36 The first bomb, at a Chicago university, opens a 17-year campaign
• October 2, 1990 aged 48 His father, terminally ill with lung cancer, kills himself
• September 19, 1995 aged 53 The Washington Post publishes the manifesto Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh urged publication in the hope that a reader would know the author. One did.
• April 3, 1996 aged 53 FBI agents arrest him at the cabin The search that led there had cost more than 50 million dollars.
• January 22, 1998 aged 55 Pleads guilty and takes life without parole The plea ended the government's pursuit of the death penalty.
• June 10, 2023 aged 81 Dies in federal custody in North Carolina He had refused further cancer treatment three months earlier.

• Timothy McVeigh 1968–2001
  Domestic terrorist whose Oklahoma City bombing became one of the deadliest attacks in American history. befriended in prison
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. built the bureau that hunted him
• Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862
  Writer and philosopher whose works on nature, individual conscience, and civil disobedience influenced environmentalism and political protest. compared to
• Jeffrey Dahmer 1960–1994
  Murdered 17 young men and boys between 1978 and 1991 in a case whose lasting scandal is how completely Milwaukee police failed his victims. contemporary in notoriety
• Lee Harvey Oswald 1939–1963
  Assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 lone actor compared in the press