in 1996 the FBI apprehended a man that eluded capture for nearly two decades his homemade letter bombs struck fear across the United States mostly targeting airlines and universities earning him the nickname the Unabomber all told he killed three people and injured 23 more he took great care not to leave a trace of evidence and unlike other serial murderers he didn't seek glory and fame for his killings if it wasn't for his manifesto the publication that outlined his disdain of technology in modern society he may never have been caught after his arrest the world was shocked that this backwoods living hermit living without electricity or running water could be the man responsible for such sophisticated killings today we explore this man the domestic terrorist and lone wolf killer Ted Kaczynski [Music] on May the 22nd 1942 Theodore John Kuczynski was born in Chicago to blue-collar second-generation polish Americans Theodore tuck and Wanda Kaczynski seven years later the Kaczynski's had a second son who was called David little is written about Ted's early years except for one incident that may have been the impetus to the boy's tendency to alienate himself according to his mother and brother when Ted was a nine month old baby he developed a severe case of hives that required him to be quarantined for ten days in the hospital afterwards Wanda reported it took a long time for her son to return to his normal happy self worried about his shyness and social development once acclaimed she considered putting her young son into studies for autistic children but ultimately decided against it one neighbor remembered him as strictly a loner when Ted was ten years old the Kaczynski family moved out of Chicago to the southwest suburb of Evergreen Park at the time this was a neighborhood predominantly made up of Irish people Italians Czechs and poles Ted's parents would later say that the move out of Chicago was so that the boys could enjoy a better class of friends at Evergreen Park Ted thrived and seems like a normal kids to most people except for one exception his remarkable intellect in the fifth grade Ted was labeled genius after he scored 167 on an IQ test his high marks put him in the same IQ range as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein dead skipped sixth grades and then at the urging of school administrators his junior year of high school as well Ted would later claim that his parents pushed him too hard and being younger and smaller than his classmates made it difficult for him to fit in with his peers still he had made some friends and he was the ringleader of an outclassed klieg known as the briefcase boys at Evergreen Park Community High School Ted was especially adept in mathematics and science and spent hours working out advanced problems in high school he joins the Ches biology German and mathematics clubs he played trombone in the marching band explored the music of bark and Vivaldi and wrote compositions for himself his younger brother David and their father to perform at home his physics teacher Robert riffey described him as honest ethical and sociable Ted attended summer school and was able to graduate at the age of just 15 that year he one of five National Merit finalists at his high school one former classmate said Ted was never really seen as a person as an individual personality he was always regarded as a walking brain so to speak Ted seemed aware of how others viewed him he later said by the time I left high school I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body and he felt a gradual increasing amount of hostility from the other children in 1958 Ted was accepted into Harvard and as part of the recommendation letter his high school counselor Louis Gillen wrote I believe Ted as one of the greatest contributions to make to society he is reflective sensitive and deeply conscious of his responsibilities to society his only drawback is a tendency to be rather quiet in his original meetings with people but most adults on our staff and many people in the community who are mature finds him easy to talk to and very challenging intellectually he has a number of friends among high school students and seems to influence them to think more seriously during this period of his life Ted held immense promise for his future but he may not have been ready to leave home one friend remembers urging Kaczynski's father not to let the boy go arguing he's too young too immature and Harvard too impersonal as an incoming Harvard freshman Kaczynski was 16 years old the Health Service doctor who interviewed him as part of the routine screening process noted good impression created attractive mature for age relaxed talks easily fluently and pleasantly likes people then gets on well with them being among the youngest and brightest freshmen Ted was housed at eight Prescott Street a three-story Victorian house just outside of Harvard Yard that year the Dean of freshman skiddy von Stade junior decided to use the residence specifically for less mature boys who needed a more intimate nurturing environment it was a place where those boys would not get lost in the larger impersonal dorms so I've come to the conclusion that while the deans plan was well-intentioned putting all the fragile young men together had the opposite effect it isolated them making adjusting to Harvard even more difficult one student living at a Prescott later said it was not unusual to spend all one's time in one's room and then rush out the door to library or class after his arrest Kaczynski's housemate Gerald burns wrote that he was as normal as I am now it was just hard on him because he was much younger than his classmates despite the adversity he took up swimming wrestling played trombone and pickup basketball he also had a few friends Kaczynski's sophomore year marked the beginning of in his words the worst experience of my life together with 21 undergraduate students Kaczynski was a participant in an unethical study conducted by Henry amery the Harvard professor and psychologist best known for pioneering personality tests before Harvard Murray had been a colonel in the US Army and an agent for the Office of Strategic Services OSS which later became known as the CIA according to his colleagues at OSS Murray was obsessed with mind control and used LSD among other drugs to determine how to brainwash subjects there is no evidence to suggest Murray used LSD in his experiments with Kaczynski though the study was officially named multiform assessments of personality development among gifted college men and its purpose was to measure how the students reacted under stress subjects were told that they would be debating personal philosophies with other students and writing essays detailing their beliefs and their aspirations the essays were then turned over to anonymous attorneys who conducted vehement sweeping and personally abusive interrogations the participants were electrodes to monitor their physiological responses and these sessions were also filmed later subjects expressions of rage during the interrogations were repeatedly played back to them some sources have suggested that Murray study was part of the federal government's research on mind-control known as project MKULTRA author Alton Shay's questions whether the purposely brutalizing psychological experiments contributed to the making of Kaczynski the Unabomber however by no means can Kaczynski's bombing campaign be late at Harvard's door though his staunch anti technological views are recognized in part to Harvard's curriculum in the late 1950s Kaczynski earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard in 1962 finishing with a 3.1 to GPA in his own words Ted later recalls his experience overall this Harvard as a tremendous thing for me he thrived on the hard work and self-discipline became enthusiastic about willpower Kaczynski enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1962 at the age of 20 and spent the next five years of his life in Ann Arbor he earned his master's degree in 1964 and his doctoral degree in 1967 Michigan it was not his first choice school he would have preferred the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Chicago he was accepted to all three but Michigan offered Kaczynski a teaching position and a financial aid package the Michigan dead received two thousand three hundred and ten dollars annually roughly the equivalent of about $19,000 today during his time there he specialized in geometric function theory and completed his dissertation boundary functions to great acclaim his doctoral adviser Allan shields called it the best I have ever directed winning the Summoner Byron Myers prize for Michigan's best mathematics dissertation of the year Kaczynski published five journal articles based on this too while Michigan and three after despite Kaczynski's academic success here in twelve days and five B's over 18 courses and his students rating him as an above-average instructor he did not enjoy Michigan he thought the standards were wretched and the professor's were mostly sloppy callous and poorly organized as he said most instructors and most students did only what they have to do there was no interest or enthusiasm or even any sense of responsibility about doing a good job the mathematics department was enthusiastic about him but many others didn't seem to notice him underneath the quiet and studious demeanour no one suspected his rage was building his ideology forming and it was at this point that he apparently made the decision to start killing Kaczynski later said I thought I will kill but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection so that I can kill again according to Sally Johnson who conducted a psychological profile on Kaczynski during his court proceedings it was during his fourth year at Michigan that he began to fantasize about breaking away from society she wrote he decided that he would do whatever he always wanted to do to go to Canada to take off in the woods with a rifle and try to live off the country if it doesn't work and if I can get back to civilization before I starve then I will come back here and kill someone I hate Kozinski also shared with Johnson that he suffered from nightmares and sexual repression during this time he began fantasizing about being female and reasons of the only way he would ever be able to touch a woman was simply to become one Kaczynski went so far as even to go to the university's health center to discuss a possible sex change that he had a sudden change of heart in the waiting room he shared with Johnson his feelings of humiliation and of disgust and then suddenly felt better when he thought about murdering the psychiatrist just then there came a major turning point in his life he later told Johnson like a phoenix I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope in late 1967 Kaczynski became the youngest assistant professor of mathematics in the history of UC Berkeley he was 25 years old he stayed on for less than two years teaching undergraduate classes in geometry and calculus before a sudden and unexpected resignation no one knew at the time that Kaczynski never intended to launch his career at Berkeley he only wanted to earn enough money to fulfill his plan of checking out of the modern world and moving into the wilderness by the mid to late 1960s Kaczynski had concluded that mathematics was too close to the evils of Technology which he despised in 1971 Kaczynski wrote an essay and it began it is argued that continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty it was imperative that this juggernaut be stopped Kaczynski went on this could not be done by simply popularizing a certain libertarian philosophy unless that philosophy is accompanied by a program of concrete action [Music] after leaving Berkeley Kaczynski lived with his parents for two years before building his remote cabin outside of Lincoln Montana on lands that he purchased with his brother's help the cabin was a simple structure with no electricity or running water at first he survived working odd jobs using an old bicycle to get to and from the town he told himself survival skills such as tracking game and edible plants identification as well as organic farming he visited the library and read classic works in their original languages in 1975 he started to see the impact of real estate development on the Montana wilderness and it enraged him he had considered living peacefully but now all he wanted was to get back at the system by acts of revenge and carry out his earlier fantasies of killing from 1978 in 1995 Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered a series of homemade bombs of increasing sophistication he took great care not to leave any fingerprints behind and he purposefully left misleading clues to confuse the authorities his first bomb was meant for Buckley Chryst a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University Crist was suspicious of the package and called campus police officer Terry maker opened its and the package exploded injuring makers left hands a second bomb in May of 1979 were sent again to Northwestern this time it was a graduate student John Harris who suffered minor cuts and burns when it exploded Kozinski's next bomb was intended to blow up a Boeing 727 American Airlines flight 444 traveling from Chicago to Washington DC the bomb was placed in the cargo hold and thankfully a faulty timing mechanism prevented it from igniting it did release smoke forcing an emergency landing and authorities stated that it would have had enough power to obliterate the plane had it exploded it was at this point that the FBI opens the Unabomber case and led a task force made up of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives and US Postal Inspection Service analysis on the bomb materials proved fruitless Kaczynski's handmade explosives were made with scrap materials found almost anywhere four more bombs caused unsuspecting victims burns and cuts from 1980 to 1985 the first serious injury though it occurred on May the 15th 1985 at Burke when graduate students and to captain in the US Air Force John Houser opens the package he lost four fingers and vision in one of his eyes this bomb was followed by two more bombs in 1985 and then on December the 11th of that year the blast from a nellen splinter loaded bomb killed Sacramento computer store owner hugh scrutton this was the first of three Unabomber casualties Kaczynski targeted another computer store owner Gary Wright in 1987 who suffered nerve damage when the bomb went off after nearly a decade the FBI was nowhere close to catching the Unabomber but then all of a sudden he stopped sending bombs for a period of six years from 1987 to 1993 the authorities thought he was gone they surmised he died by accidental death or natural causes or maybe he had a change of heart Kaczynski's reign of terror it wasn't over though he mailed four more bombs from 1993 to 1995 murdering two more people including Thomas J Massa an advertising executive and Gilbert Brent Murry a timber industry lobbyist his two other bombs are severely wounded and disfigured david gallant are a computer science professor at yale university and charles Epstein a geneticist at the University of California San Francisco Kaczynski's bombs were often stamps with the letters FC and the FBI noted the theme of nature and trees since he often included bits of bark and branches and his explosive packages [Music] in 1995 Kaczynski contacted the media blackmailing the New York Times in Washington Post into publishing his thirty five thousand word essay industrial society and his future the media dubbed this the Unabomber manifesto and in exchange for its release word-for-word he would desist from terrorism in his manifesto Kaczynski asserts that the downfall of the human race can be attributed to the Industrial Revolution and modern technological society he claimed widespread psychological suffering has taken place because of technology's destabilizing effect and he argues people spend too much time engaged in useless pursuits such as the consumption of entertainment our society it tends to regards as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual can't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good Kaczynski saw the only way of returning to wild nature and freedom was to destroy progress which he believed was entirely possible the manifestos reception was regarded as a work of genius by some and entirely sane by others it has been compared to Aldous Huxley's brave new world and draw draw wells in 1984 James Q Wilson wrote that it was a carefully reasoned artfully written paper if it is the work of a madman then the writings of many political philosophers jean-jacques Rousseau Tom Paine Karl Marx are scarcely more sane [Music] following the publication of the manifesto David Kaczynski and his wife Linda noticed chilling familiarities between his brothers letters and an earlier essay that Ted wrote for three weeks they pored over years of Correspondence looking for telltale clues before contacting the authorities once convinced the Unabomber it could be David's brother they hired an attorney contacted a criminal profiler to analyze the letters and contact the FBI at the time agents were actively following up on over 2000 tips and a recluse living in the backwoods of Montana didn't seem to match their expectations not until expert linguists analyzed the letters and the essay and determined that they were certainly the same man FBI agents arrested Kaczynski on April the 3rd 1996 at his cabin where he was found in an unkempt State a search of his cabin revealed a cache of bombing components 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments descriptions of the Unabomber crimes and one live bomb ready for the mailing they also found what appeared to be the original typed manuscripts of industrial society and its future by this point the Unabomber had been the target of the most expensive investigation in FBI history a federal grand jury indicted Kaczynski in April of 1996 on ten counts of illegally transporting mailing and using bombs and three counts of murder Kozinski's defense had attempted to use the insanity defense in order to avoid the death penalty that Kaczynski refused he tried to fire his attorneys and attempted suicide by hanging on January the 9th on the judge's order Kaczynski underwent a psychological evaluation by Sally Johnson who gave him a provisional diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia regardless he was determined to be fit to stand trial and instead pled guilty on all charges On January the 22nd 1998 in exchange for avoiding the death penalty at the sentencing Kaczynski displayed no emotion or remorse for his heinous crimes the contents of this cabin was sold at auction and netted two hundred and thirty two thousand dollars for Kozinski's victims today Ted Kaczynski is serving eight consecutive life sentences in a maximum-security prison in Florence Colorado where he spends 23 hours a day in his cell he maintains an oddly active connection to many people on the outside through letters and contacts the media with regularity the ladder D collection correspondence since his arrest with over 400 people is housed at the University of Michigan's Special Collections library further his Montana cabin seized by the US government is currently on display at the Museum in Washington DC so I really hope you enjoyed that bio graphics video if you did don't forget to subscribe to this channel for brand new biographies every Monday and 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