Was The Unabomber The Original Incel?
Unpacking Ted Kaczynski's Relationships With Women
Ted Kaczynski didn't have much luck with the ladies, which some observers say may have contributed to his feelings of alienation.
BY GINA TRON FEBRUARY 28, 2020, 6:49 PM ET Crime TV
In this April 4, 1996 file photo, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the
Unabomber, is flanked by federal agents as he is led to a car from
the federal courthouse in Helena, Montana. Photo: AP
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had a complicated, and at times, hostile relationship with women.
When he was arrested in 1996 for his bombing spree — which killed three people and injured 23 between 1978 and 1995 — he was 54 and had never had a girlfriend. He lived alone as a mostly self-sufficient hermit in a cabin in Lincoln, Montana.
But even before he began living as a recluse, he struggled to connect with women.
The Netflix docu-series “Unabomber - In His Own Words" noted that while Kaczynski excelled academically during the early part of his life, he had trouble connecting with other people socially. Then, the prodigious student was accepted at Harvard when he was just 16. Elliott Halpern, a filmmaker behind the docu-series, blamed the university experience, in part, for stunting Kaczynski's emotional growth.
“If you have this culmination of psychological immaturity and high intelligence and high sensitivity and you're dropped into an environment where it’s really challenging for you and girls are not going to date you, it’s definitely going to have an affect on you,” he told Oxygen.com.
The only apparent woman that Kaczynski was ever romantically involved with was a co-worker he met while employed at Cushion-Pak, an Illinois rubber foam factory near the Kaczynski family home, USA Today reported. He was working under his younger brother David, who was a supervisor at the factory.
Ted and the woman had a few dates in 1978, and that woman also gave the future domestic terrorist what FBI agent Kathy Puckett believes was his first kiss at age 36, she told legal analyst Lis Wiehl in the author's upcoming book "Hunting The Unabomber."
"He writes about how she kissed him," Puckett explained. "And, he describes it like a Martian meeting an Earthling. He said she was doing something with her tongue that he couldn't quite understand. He had never kissed another woman in his life, because if he had, he would have written it down."
Soon enough though, the woman rejected Ted as a possible partner.
“Ted was extremely upset,” David Kaczynski reflected in “Unabomber - In His Own Words.” ”He wrote these limericks [...] these very unflattering, ugly sort of limericks about her and he posted them around the work site.”
David Kaczynski said he threatened to fire Ted if he didn’t stop harassing the woman, and Ted responded by showing up to work the next day and posting another one of the limericks up. As a result, David did indeed fire him.
Elizabeth Trojian, one of the two Canadian filmmakers behind the Netflix docu-series, told Oxygen.com that this situation only further proved to Ted that he couldn't connect to women.
“I think it was really hard for him,” she said. “I think he went to the factory with the effort that he was going to connect with people and connect with his brother. He made this leap forward to try and date this woman and when it failed, it felt extreme to Ted. If he felt objected against, he wanted to object back harder.”
Puckett told Wiehl that Kaczynski struggled to even approach other women. She said that he had journaled "long agonizing passages that we took from the cabin about how he had a crush on a girl who worked at a gas station in Montana, and he bought a new pair of jeans in an effort to walk up to her, and he ended up sobbing in front of his campfire, because he couldn't bring up the nerve to talk to her."
He also journaled about a failed attempt to join a singles hiking group.
"He goes on a hike and is trying to talk to people, and he writes about this beautiful woman, but he couldn't talk to her," Puckett said. "He couldn't make the connection."
Kaczynski also appeared to hung up on being a virgin — something that caused friction between him and his brother David when the latter became engaged to a woman named Linda Patrik. An irate Kaczynski felt betrayed.
“He even wrote a letter to David talking about how they were both virgins, intimating that by getting married, David was breaking that bond,” Puckett said in "Hunting The Unabomber."
At this point, Kaczynski was at least 44 years old.
Wiehl told Oxygen.com that Kaczynski explained to his brother in seething letters that marrying Parik “was the ultimate betrayal” and “it was clear that part of the betrayal was the virginity.”
If his anger over being a virgin was true, Kaczynski could be one of the first high-profile incels — or involuntary celibate, an increasingly vocal online subculture — before the term ever existed. The term incel has been linked to several infamous deadly attacks. In 2014, Elliot Rodger blamed women's lack of attraction to him for his deadly rampage. He killed six people and injured 14 before killing himself. Rodger was allegedly cited as a warped hero by Alek Minassian. He's accused of using his van to fatally mow down 10 people and injure 16 on a busy Toronto, Canada street.
Kaczynski not only cut his own brother out of his life but he also cut ties with his mother too. While the real reason for doing so remains unclear, Trojian theorized that “if you have issues with women, if you can’t connect with women, if you can’t have a personal relationship then you are going to begin to have feelings of anger towards your mother.”
In Kaczynski's notorious manifesto, which was published in 1995, Ted wrote that “feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.”
Halpern noted that Kaczynski did have a “general hostility towards women.”
The bomber’s former neighbor, Wendy Gehring, said in the docu-series, “In my opinion, he hated women. He had no use for us."
However, it can be argued that while he clearly had issues connecting with women romantically, he did respect them at points in his life. Trojian said that Ted was full of dichotomies and she didn’t get the sense that he hated women through her correspondence with him. She and Halpern exchanged letters with Ted during the filmmaking process.
Halpern said it’s important to note that Kaczynski, despite all his issues with women, selected a female journalist as the first person to interview him after his arrest. Theresa Kintz, now a lecturer in sociology at Indiana State University, accepted Ted’s invitation and interviewed him in 1999 for Earth First! Journal. She was an editor at the ecological resistance publication at the time, and Kaczynski chose her over a gaggle of male journalists who were chomping at the bit to interview him, Halpern said. The interview between Kaczynski and Kintz is prominently featured in the docu-series.
“The journalist that he reached out to and who he trusted his entire story to, initially, was a woman,” Halpern. “A young woman.”
And, Trojian doesn't think he had any ulterior motive for choosing a woman other than mutual respect.
“It’s very important to make it clear, I have read every line in the 16 hours of their interview and there is nothing flirty, no sexualization,” Trojian said. “He liked her intellect and wanted to connect with her. I think that’s really important.”
She added of her interactions with Kaczynski, “there’s the person you come in contact with that does not seem like a murdering terrorist and then there’s this internal person who has such dark thoughts and it makes him a very complex human.”
Since his subsequent life sentences, all of which he is currently serving in Colorado, he's apparently had more success with women. The attention his case has garnered has triggered an onslaught of letters from women, Kaczynski noted in an interview included in “Unabomber - In His Own Words.” In an interview included in the series, he acknowledged that many women have shown interest in him but seemingly dismissed their interest as genuine because he said certain women tend to gravitate towards high profile inmates like himself.
Reporter Jill Sederstrom contributed to this report.
My brother, the Unabomber
David Kaczynski on his agonising decision to inform on his sibling and why, despite their not having spoken for 20 years, he still loves him
Ed PilkingtonTue 15 Sep 2009
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had a complicated, and at times, hostile relationship with women.
When he was arrested in 1996 for his bombing spree — which killed three people and injured 23 between 1978 and 1995 — he was 54 and had never had a girlfriend. He lived alone as a mostly self-sufficient hermit in a cabin in Lincoln, Montana.
But even before he began living as a recluse, he struggled to connect with women.
The Netflix docu-series “Unabomber - In His Own Words" noted that while Kaczynski excelled academically during the early part of his life, he had trouble connecting with other people socially. Then, the prodigious student was accepted at Harvard when he was just 16. Elliott Halpern, a filmmaker behind the docu-series, blamed the university experience, in part, for stunting Kaczynski's emotional growth.
“If you have this culmination of psychological immaturity and high intelligence and high sensitivity and you're dropped into an environment where it’s really challenging for you and girls are not going to date you, it’s definitely going to have an affect on you,” he told Oxygen.com.
The only apparent woman that Kaczynski was ever romantically involved with was a co-worker he met while employed at Cushion-Pak, an Illinois rubber foam factory near the Kaczynski family home, USA Today reported. He was working under his younger brother David, who was a supervisor at the factory.
Ted and the woman had a few dates in 1978, and that woman also gave the future domestic terrorist what FBI agent Kathy Puckett believes was his first kiss at age 36, she told legal analyst Lis Wiehl in the author's upcoming book "Hunting The Unabomber."
"He writes about how she kissed him," Puckett explained. "And, he describes it like a Martian meeting an Earthling. He said she was doing something with her tongue that he couldn't quite understand. He had never kissed another woman in his life, because if he had, he would have written it down."
Soon enough though, the woman rejected Ted as a possible partner.
“Ted was extremely upset,” David Kaczynski reflected in “Unabomber - In His Own Words.” ”He wrote these limericks [...] these very unflattering, ugly sort of limericks about her and he posted them around the work site.”
David Kaczynski said he threatened to fire Ted if he didn’t stop harassing the woman, and Ted responded by showing up to work the next day and posting another one of the limericks up. As a result, David did indeed fire him.
Elizabeth Trojian, one of the two Canadian filmmakers behind the Netflix docu-series, told Oxygen.com that this situation only further proved to Ted that he couldn't connect to women.
“I think it was really hard for him,” she said. “I think he went to the factory with the effort that he was going to connect with people and connect with his brother. He made this leap forward to try and date this woman and when it failed, it felt extreme to Ted. If he felt objected against, he wanted to object back harder.”
Puckett told Wiehl that Kaczynski struggled to even approach other women. She said that he had journaled "long agonizing passages that we took from the cabin about how he had a crush on a girl who worked at a gas station in Montana, and he bought a new pair of jeans in an effort to walk up to her, and he ended up sobbing in front of his campfire, because he couldn't bring up the nerve to talk to her."
He also journaled about a failed attempt to join a singles hiking group.
"He goes on a hike and is trying to talk to people, and he writes about this beautiful woman, but he couldn't talk to her," Puckett said. "He couldn't make the connection."
Kaczynski also appeared to hung up on being a virgin — something that caused friction between him and his brother David when the latter became engaged to a woman named Linda Patrik. An irate Kaczynski felt betrayed.
“He even wrote a letter to David talking about how they were both virgins, intimating that by getting married, David was breaking that bond,” Puckett said in "Hunting The Unabomber."
At this point, Kaczynski was at least 44 years old.
Wiehl told Oxygen.com that Kaczynski explained to his brother in seething letters that marrying Parik “was the ultimate betrayal” and “it was clear that part of the betrayal was the virginity.”
If his anger over being a virgin was true, Kaczynski could be one of the first high-profile incels — or involuntary celibate, an increasingly vocal online subculture — before the term ever existed. The term incel has been linked to several infamous deadly attacks. In 2014, Elliot Rodger blamed women's lack of attraction to him for his deadly rampage. He killed six people and injured 14 before killing himself. Rodger was allegedly cited as a warped hero by Alek Minassian. He's accused of using his van to fatally mow down 10 people and injure 16 on a busy Toronto, Canada street.
Kaczynski not only cut his own brother out of his life but he also cut ties with his mother too. While the real reason for doing so remains unclear, Trojian theorized that “if you have issues with women, if you can’t connect with women, if you can’t have a personal relationship then you are going to begin to have feelings of anger towards your mother.”
In Kaczynski's notorious manifesto, which was published in 1995, Ted wrote that “feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.”
Halpern noted that Kaczynski did have a “general hostility towards women.”
The bomber’s former neighbor, Wendy Gehring, said in the docu-series, “In my opinion, he hated women. He had no use for us."
However, it can be argued that while he clearly had issues connecting with women romantically, he did respect them at points in his life. Trojian said that Ted was full of dichotomies and she didn’t get the sense that he hated women through her correspondence with him. She and Halpern exchanged letters with Ted during the filmmaking process.
Halpern said it’s important to note that Kaczynski, despite all his issues with women, selected a female journalist as the first person to interview him after his arrest. Theresa Kintz, now a lecturer in sociology at Indiana State University, accepted Ted’s invitation and interviewed him in 1999 for Earth First! Journal. She was an editor at the ecological resistance publication at the time, and Kaczynski chose her over a gaggle of male journalists who were chomping at the bit to interview him, Halpern said. The interview between Kaczynski and Kintz is prominently featured in the docu-series.
“The journalist that he reached out to and who he trusted his entire story to, initially, was a woman,” Halpern. “A young woman.”
And, Trojian doesn't think he had any ulterior motive for choosing a woman other than mutual respect.
“It’s very important to make it clear, I have read every line in the 16 hours of their interview and there is nothing flirty, no sexualization,” Trojian said. “He liked her intellect and wanted to connect with her. I think that’s really important.”
She added of her interactions with Kaczynski, “there’s the person you come in contact with that does not seem like a murdering terrorist and then there’s this internal person who has such dark thoughts and it makes him a very complex human.”
Since his subsequent life sentences, all of which he is currently serving in Colorado, he's apparently had more success with women. The attention his case has garnered has triggered an onslaught of letters from women, Kaczynski noted in an interview included in “Unabomber - In His Own Words.” In an interview included in the series, he acknowledged that many women have shown interest in him but seemingly dismissed their interest as genuine because he said certain women tend to gravitate towards high profile inmates like himself.
Reporter Jill Sederstrom contributed to this report.
My brother, the Unabomber
David Kaczynski on his agonising decision to inform on his sibling and why, despite their not having spoken for 20 years, he still loves him
Ed PilkingtonTue 15 Sep 2009
Terror through the mail . . .
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Photograph: AP
Of all the riveting stories that David Kaczynski tells about his brother Ted, the most haunting is the tale of the rabbit in the cage. One summer during their 1950s childhood, spent in a suburb outside Chicago, their father caught a baby rabbit. He put it on display in the backyard in a little cage fashioned out of wood and wire. A crowd of local kids, David among them, gathered round, jostling to get a better view.
Of all the riveting stories that David Kaczynski tells about his brother Ted, the most haunting is the tale of the rabbit in the cage. One summer during their 1950s childhood, spent in a suburb outside Chicago, their father caught a baby rabbit. He put it on display in the backyard in a little cage fashioned out of wood and wire. A crowd of local kids, David among them, gathered round, jostling to get a better view.
Suddenly there was a cry from the back: "Oh, oh, let it go!" The boys turn round to find Ted looking distressed and panicked at the sight of the rabbit visibly trembling in its box. The mood turned instantly from jovial to shame-faced; how funny it had been to be ogling at the tiny animal, and how cruel it seemed now. The father grabbed the box and quickly carried it to a wooded area across the street where he let the little rabbit go, back to the wild.
The story is poignant in part because Kaczynski's brother now lives in a cage built of concrete and reinforced steel within a "supermax" security prison, and in part because of how the story was recalled to David years later. For he had forgotten all about the rabbit for the best part of 40 years, until his mother reminded him of it – on the day he told her that his brother was suspected of being the Unabomber, the "neo-Luddite" murderer who, over 17 years, waged a twisted campaign of mail bombings against targets including American universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring many more. Kaczynski confessed to his mother that he had informed on Ted to the FBI, fearing further atrocities, and that because of his action, his brother could face the death penalty.
Kaczynski had no idea how his mother would react to the news. Would she disown him for betraying his own brother? Would she for ever cast him out of her love? Instead, she took his head in her hands and kissed him. "I know you love Ted, and wouldn't have done that if you hadn't had to," she said. And then she told him the story of the rabbit in the cage. "She told me that story," Kaczynski says, "at the moment Ted was caught, was trapped, knowing perhaps he would end in the fulfilment of his own worst nightmare."
Kaczynski knows a thing or two about the joys and the torture of being a younger brother, and has distilled his experiences of life as the brother of the Unabomber into an essay for a new collection of reflections on brotherly love and rivalry. David calls his chapter Missing Parts – he has had virtually no contact with Ted for the past 20 years and has, in a sense, lost part of himself in the process. By 1996, when Ted was brought into court on 13 counts of bombing and murder, they had already been estranged for seven years. Kaczynski recalls seeing Ted again after all that time: "He walked into the court almost directly towards me, but he never made eye contact. He just turned and sat down with his back to me."
Kaczynski's essay is painful testimony to the ability of brothers to inflict almost unthinkable wounds on each other. Ted cut off all relations with David in 1989; David shopped Ted to the Feds six years later. But it also dwells on the kinder side of brotherhood; on the friendship and loyalty that each bestowed upon the other, and on the love that Kaczynski still reserves for Ted despite his grotesque deeds.
Through the pall of anger and ugliness that descended over his brother, the vicious letters he received from Ted and the rants against technology, Kaczynski still remembers the small acts of kindness and affection that Ted extended to him in their younger years. When David, aged three, couldn't reach the door handle in their home, Ted improvised a new one for him out of an old spool of thread.
Every weekend, the brothers would be driven by their father into the forests outside Chicago, where they would revel in nature (a theme that would build over the years), identifying plants and pitching tents. "Some of the happiest experiences of my life were these with Ted; out of doors, a release from confinement of various kinds," Kaczynski says when we meet in New York. "Growing up, I never doubted my brother's fundamental loyalty and love, or felt the slightest insecurity in his presence."
And yet, from an early age, Kaczynski was aware of something different, something inexplicable and out of place about his big brother. Ted was hyper-smart – everybody knew that. He was a mathematics whizz-kid and destined for Harvard and great things. But he was also a withdrawn, awkward boy who recoiled from social contact.
"When we were young, friends and family would turn up at our house unannounced. My feeling was 'Oh good! Here's Uncle Stanley or our friend Ralph' – but Ted's reaction was the opposite. He saw it as an incursion into his world, and almost in panic would run upstairs to the attic. I remember thinking, why did he have this aversion to people?"
Kaczynski was only seven when he first formulated those doubts into words. "What's wrong with Teddy?" he asked his mother. In reply, she told him that when Ted was just a baby, he had been hospitalised for several days with a rash; the experience of being separated from his parents had, she believed, hurt him deeply with lasting consequences. Then she said something startling to her younger son: "Never abandon Ted, because that's what he fears the most."
And until he faced the awful decision of whether to turn Ted over to the FBI, Kaczynski never did abandon him. In spite of his brother's growing eccentricities, he provided Ted with a social prop. "It almost seemed I was his ticket to having social relationships."
Indeed, it was because of David that Ted ended up in Montana, the rugged north-western state in which he built his now infamous remote wooden cabin. Together they had bought a plot of forest land outside Lincoln, and there Ted constructed what was to become the headquarters of his bombing campaign.
Though David was the socially-adept half of the relationship, he continued to idolise and emulate Ted throughout his youth and well into adulthood. He applied for Harvard, following in Ted's footsteps, but was rejected. Later, he decided to follow Ted's example and go back to the land. When Ted refused to let him build a second cabin on their shared plot in Montana, Kaczynski went instead to a wild part of western Texas where, just like his brother, he lived without running water or electricity for eight years in a cabin he built by hand. They would correspond frequently; two spartan men in their cabin hermitages 1,000 miles apart.
But as time passed, it became clear they were not really communicating, and were, in fact, living in wholly separate wildernesses. Kaczynski's vision of back-to-the-land was a spiritual journey of discovery, towards some inner understanding, whereas Ted's philosophy, his cabinology, was all about getting away from the collective mess of the modern world. There was a despondency, a sorry defeatism in him. "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."
The moment that crystallised this yawning gulf between them came, paradoxically, at a time when the brothers had never felt more close. It was 1969 and they had spent the whole summer together, travelling huge distances across Canada in search of a plot of land where Ted could begin his anti-civilisation mission. At the end of the trip, as they were driving back to Chicago, they camped overnight in the grasslands of Nebraska. They lay side by side, staring up at the immense night sky stuffed with stars. David felt eager to get home, to familiar things and their mother's home cooking. "I wish we were home," he said.
Ted felt the opposite: "Really? I wish we didn't have to go back," he said.
Later, of course, the distinctions grew stark and ugly. From 1977, Ted began sending his parents angry, blistering letters accusing them of never having loved him. Then, in 1978, Kaczynski ended up sacking his own brother from a factory job in Illinois after Ted began harassing a fellow woman worker, posting crude and offensive limericks about her on the factory wall. The timing was significant – only a few months before, in May 1978, he had posted his first mail bomb to a university professor in Chicago, who was mildly injured in the blast. A year later, he came close to blowing up an American Airlines jet but the bomb failed to detonate.
Over time, Ted's homemade bombs became more sophisticated and powerful, and the first serious injury occurred in 1982 when a university secretary suffered severe burns to her hands. Three people died during the 16-bomb campaign – a computer rental store owner in 1985, an advertising executive in 1994, and (the final target) a timber industry lobbyist in 1995. Another 23 suffered often hideous injuries, the victims having often been selected – by dint of Ted's loathing of technology – from university departments and airlines; hence the moniker Unabomber (University and Airline Bomber).
As the violence escalated, so too did the hostility Ted showed for his family. The final rift came in 1989, when Kaczynski wrote to Ted to tell him he was leaving his cabin retreat in Texas and going to live in New York state with Linda, a childhood friend with whom he had fallen in love. Ted's response was a 20-page letter in which he tore into his brother, accusing him of lacking the integrity to lead a pure life.
"Wow! It was like a metaphorical bomb for me, that he was so hostile," Kaczynski says. "It was at a different level to anything before."
Ted ended the letter by saying that he would have nothing to do with his brother from then on. If there was a family emergency, David was to put a line under the stamp on the envelope, otherwise Ted would just burn the letter unopened. If David abused the privilege of the line under the stamp, by using it for anything other than a genuine emergency, all lines of contact would be terminated for ever.
Kaczynski only once used the line under the stamp, to tell Ted that their father was dying from lung cancer. Ted did reply to that letter. He thanked David for using the line appropriately. He made no mention of their father.
In the end it was Linda, by now Kaczynski's wife, who connected Ted to the Unabomber. She had noticed telling similarities from newspaper accounts. At first Kaczynski had been sceptical, but then in 1995 when the Unabomber produced his 35,000-word "manifesto", excoriating the industrial revolution and modern science, David had a sinking feeling. The tone was chillingly similar to some of the more hate-filled letters he had received from Ted, and there was one phrase in particular he recognised: "Cool-headed logicians."
The recognition that his brother might be the Unabomber sent Kaczynski into a tailspin. "It was a feeling of being trapped – trapped in this brother relationship, trapped in this dilemma in which people's lives were at stake either way. One way, if we did nothing, another bomb might go off and more people might die. The other way, I turned Ted in and he would be executed."
Weeks of agonising followed. His mother's exhortation – never abandon Ted! – rang in his ears, but ultimately the decision was simple. He could not stand idly by and watch more people die. He went to the FBI.
His brother's life was now at stake. Though the authorities assured Kaczynski they would not seek the death penalty, they reneged on the promise. The threatened capital punishment was only dropped after Ted was diagnosed with schizophrenia and pleaded guilty to all charges.
For Kaczynski, the years since Ted was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996 have been like a prolonged discourse in what it is to be a brother. There has been plenty of time to reflect on what happened, on what Ted did. He doesn't feel guilt so much as regret. "That time I sacked him, could I have been less angry, tried a different approach? Could I have been more understanding, a better brother?"
Kaczynski is still trapped in the definition of being the Unabomber's brother. He now devotes his working life to campaigning against death row, inspired by his sense of betrayal by the federal prosecutors. As head of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, he seeks to build bridges between victims of violence and the relatives of the perpetrators. His closest friend is Gary Wright, a computer store owner from Utah who had more than 200 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body from one of Ted's bombs.
Kaczynski has no idea how Ted is doing in his cage in a high security prison in Colorado. He never replies to letters, and the prison authorities will not say how, or even if, he is being treated for his mental illness. Kaczynski thinks often of that rabbit. "Where Ted is, in some senses, is his worst nightmare. Totally under other people's control, enclosed, cut off from the sky and the wilderness."
Sometimes Kaczynski will be driving down the road from his home in upstate New York and, glancing in the rear-view mirror, he'll see Ted driving the car behind. A moment later, he'll realise it's just another man with a beard. He remembers how the Unabomber once sent a bomb to an airline executive. It was concealed in a hollowed-out copy of a book. Its title: Ice Brothers.
Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, edited by Andrew Blauner and with a foreword by Frank McCourt, is published in the US by Jossey-Bass books.
The story is poignant in part because Kaczynski's brother now lives in a cage built of concrete and reinforced steel within a "supermax" security prison, and in part because of how the story was recalled to David years later. For he had forgotten all about the rabbit for the best part of 40 years, until his mother reminded him of it – on the day he told her that his brother was suspected of being the Unabomber, the "neo-Luddite" murderer who, over 17 years, waged a twisted campaign of mail bombings against targets including American universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring many more. Kaczynski confessed to his mother that he had informed on Ted to the FBI, fearing further atrocities, and that because of his action, his brother could face the death penalty.
Kaczynski had no idea how his mother would react to the news. Would she disown him for betraying his own brother? Would she for ever cast him out of her love? Instead, she took his head in her hands and kissed him. "I know you love Ted, and wouldn't have done that if you hadn't had to," she said. And then she told him the story of the rabbit in the cage. "She told me that story," Kaczynski says, "at the moment Ted was caught, was trapped, knowing perhaps he would end in the fulfilment of his own worst nightmare."
Kaczynski knows a thing or two about the joys and the torture of being a younger brother, and has distilled his experiences of life as the brother of the Unabomber into an essay for a new collection of reflections on brotherly love and rivalry. David calls his chapter Missing Parts – he has had virtually no contact with Ted for the past 20 years and has, in a sense, lost part of himself in the process. By 1996, when Ted was brought into court on 13 counts of bombing and murder, they had already been estranged for seven years. Kaczynski recalls seeing Ted again after all that time: "He walked into the court almost directly towards me, but he never made eye contact. He just turned and sat down with his back to me."
Kaczynski's essay is painful testimony to the ability of brothers to inflict almost unthinkable wounds on each other. Ted cut off all relations with David in 1989; David shopped Ted to the Feds six years later. But it also dwells on the kinder side of brotherhood; on the friendship and loyalty that each bestowed upon the other, and on the love that Kaczynski still reserves for Ted despite his grotesque deeds.
Through the pall of anger and ugliness that descended over his brother, the vicious letters he received from Ted and the rants against technology, Kaczynski still remembers the small acts of kindness and affection that Ted extended to him in their younger years. When David, aged three, couldn't reach the door handle in their home, Ted improvised a new one for him out of an old spool of thread.
Every weekend, the brothers would be driven by their father into the forests outside Chicago, where they would revel in nature (a theme that would build over the years), identifying plants and pitching tents. "Some of the happiest experiences of my life were these with Ted; out of doors, a release from confinement of various kinds," Kaczynski says when we meet in New York. "Growing up, I never doubted my brother's fundamental loyalty and love, or felt the slightest insecurity in his presence."
And yet, from an early age, Kaczynski was aware of something different, something inexplicable and out of place about his big brother. Ted was hyper-smart – everybody knew that. He was a mathematics whizz-kid and destined for Harvard and great things. But he was also a withdrawn, awkward boy who recoiled from social contact.
"When we were young, friends and family would turn up at our house unannounced. My feeling was 'Oh good! Here's Uncle Stanley or our friend Ralph' – but Ted's reaction was the opposite. He saw it as an incursion into his world, and almost in panic would run upstairs to the attic. I remember thinking, why did he have this aversion to people?"
Kaczynski was only seven when he first formulated those doubts into words. "What's wrong with Teddy?" he asked his mother. In reply, she told him that when Ted was just a baby, he had been hospitalised for several days with a rash; the experience of being separated from his parents had, she believed, hurt him deeply with lasting consequences. Then she said something startling to her younger son: "Never abandon Ted, because that's what he fears the most."
And until he faced the awful decision of whether to turn Ted over to the FBI, Kaczynski never did abandon him. In spite of his brother's growing eccentricities, he provided Ted with a social prop. "It almost seemed I was his ticket to having social relationships."
Indeed, it was because of David that Ted ended up in Montana, the rugged north-western state in which he built his now infamous remote wooden cabin. Together they had bought a plot of forest land outside Lincoln, and there Ted constructed what was to become the headquarters of his bombing campaign.
Though David was the socially-adept half of the relationship, he continued to idolise and emulate Ted throughout his youth and well into adulthood. He applied for Harvard, following in Ted's footsteps, but was rejected. Later, he decided to follow Ted's example and go back to the land. When Ted refused to let him build a second cabin on their shared plot in Montana, Kaczynski went instead to a wild part of western Texas where, just like his brother, he lived without running water or electricity for eight years in a cabin he built by hand. They would correspond frequently; two spartan men in their cabin hermitages 1,000 miles apart.
But as time passed, it became clear they were not really communicating, and were, in fact, living in wholly separate wildernesses. Kaczynski's vision of back-to-the-land was a spiritual journey of discovery, towards some inner understanding, whereas Ted's philosophy, his cabinology, was all about getting away from the collective mess of the modern world. There was a despondency, a sorry defeatism in him. "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."
The moment that crystallised this yawning gulf between them came, paradoxically, at a time when the brothers had never felt more close. It was 1969 and they had spent the whole summer together, travelling huge distances across Canada in search of a plot of land where Ted could begin his anti-civilisation mission. At the end of the trip, as they were driving back to Chicago, they camped overnight in the grasslands of Nebraska. They lay side by side, staring up at the immense night sky stuffed with stars. David felt eager to get home, to familiar things and their mother's home cooking. "I wish we were home," he said.
Ted felt the opposite: "Really? I wish we didn't have to go back," he said.
Later, of course, the distinctions grew stark and ugly. From 1977, Ted began sending his parents angry, blistering letters accusing them of never having loved him. Then, in 1978, Kaczynski ended up sacking his own brother from a factory job in Illinois after Ted began harassing a fellow woman worker, posting crude and offensive limericks about her on the factory wall. The timing was significant – only a few months before, in May 1978, he had posted his first mail bomb to a university professor in Chicago, who was mildly injured in the blast. A year later, he came close to blowing up an American Airlines jet but the bomb failed to detonate.
Over time, Ted's homemade bombs became more sophisticated and powerful, and the first serious injury occurred in 1982 when a university secretary suffered severe burns to her hands. Three people died during the 16-bomb campaign – a computer rental store owner in 1985, an advertising executive in 1994, and (the final target) a timber industry lobbyist in 1995. Another 23 suffered often hideous injuries, the victims having often been selected – by dint of Ted's loathing of technology – from university departments and airlines; hence the moniker Unabomber (University and Airline Bomber).
As the violence escalated, so too did the hostility Ted showed for his family. The final rift came in 1989, when Kaczynski wrote to Ted to tell him he was leaving his cabin retreat in Texas and going to live in New York state with Linda, a childhood friend with whom he had fallen in love. Ted's response was a 20-page letter in which he tore into his brother, accusing him of lacking the integrity to lead a pure life.
"Wow! It was like a metaphorical bomb for me, that he was so hostile," Kaczynski says. "It was at a different level to anything before."
Ted ended the letter by saying that he would have nothing to do with his brother from then on. If there was a family emergency, David was to put a line under the stamp on the envelope, otherwise Ted would just burn the letter unopened. If David abused the privilege of the line under the stamp, by using it for anything other than a genuine emergency, all lines of contact would be terminated for ever.
Kaczynski only once used the line under the stamp, to tell Ted that their father was dying from lung cancer. Ted did reply to that letter. He thanked David for using the line appropriately. He made no mention of their father.
In the end it was Linda, by now Kaczynski's wife, who connected Ted to the Unabomber. She had noticed telling similarities from newspaper accounts. At first Kaczynski had been sceptical, but then in 1995 when the Unabomber produced his 35,000-word "manifesto", excoriating the industrial revolution and modern science, David had a sinking feeling. The tone was chillingly similar to some of the more hate-filled letters he had received from Ted, and there was one phrase in particular he recognised: "Cool-headed logicians."
The recognition that his brother might be the Unabomber sent Kaczynski into a tailspin. "It was a feeling of being trapped – trapped in this brother relationship, trapped in this dilemma in which people's lives were at stake either way. One way, if we did nothing, another bomb might go off and more people might die. The other way, I turned Ted in and he would be executed."
Weeks of agonising followed. His mother's exhortation – never abandon Ted! – rang in his ears, but ultimately the decision was simple. He could not stand idly by and watch more people die. He went to the FBI.
His brother's life was now at stake. Though the authorities assured Kaczynski they would not seek the death penalty, they reneged on the promise. The threatened capital punishment was only dropped after Ted was diagnosed with schizophrenia and pleaded guilty to all charges.
For Kaczynski, the years since Ted was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996 have been like a prolonged discourse in what it is to be a brother. There has been plenty of time to reflect on what happened, on what Ted did. He doesn't feel guilt so much as regret. "That time I sacked him, could I have been less angry, tried a different approach? Could I have been more understanding, a better brother?"
Kaczynski is still trapped in the definition of being the Unabomber's brother. He now devotes his working life to campaigning against death row, inspired by his sense of betrayal by the federal prosecutors. As head of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, he seeks to build bridges between victims of violence and the relatives of the perpetrators. His closest friend is Gary Wright, a computer store owner from Utah who had more than 200 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body from one of Ted's bombs.
Kaczynski has no idea how Ted is doing in his cage in a high security prison in Colorado. He never replies to letters, and the prison authorities will not say how, or even if, he is being treated for his mental illness. Kaczynski thinks often of that rabbit. "Where Ted is, in some senses, is his worst nightmare. Totally under other people's control, enclosed, cut off from the sky and the wilderness."
Sometimes Kaczynski will be driving down the road from his home in upstate New York and, glancing in the rear-view mirror, he'll see Ted driving the car behind. A moment later, he'll realise it's just another man with a beard. He remembers how the Unabomber once sent a bomb to an airline executive. It was concealed in a hollowed-out copy of a book. Its title: Ice Brothers.
Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, edited by Andrew Blauner and with a foreword by Frank McCourt, is published in the US by Jossey-Bass books.
Barmen, 1913. Photo: Public Domain
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels
