Secret anguish of Unabomber’s family

Wanda Kaczynski’s world shattered with the force of exploding TNT when she learned her eccentric genius son is suspected of being the Unabomber.

“Oh, my God, not my boy, not Ted” sobbed the 77-year-old mom of Theodore Kaczynski. “He’s a sweet person. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

The devastated mom can’t believe her precious son is the 53-year-old man the FBI says held the nation in a grip of terror for 18 years -- killing three people and injuring 23 others with homemade bombs.

Two weeks before federal agents noved in to make an arrest. Ted’s brother David, 46, called a family meeting to explain he had evidence his brilliant older brother, Ted, was the terrorist bomber, reveals a source.

Greater than the agony of turning in his own brother was the pain David felt as he explained what he’d learned to his mom

“I put together a jigsaw puzzle and when I saw the whole picture. I was horrified -- it showed Ted was the Unibomber,” an insider says he whispered to his heartbroken mom.

“I love him, mom - but I turned him in anyway. How would I have felt if one nore person died, because I didn’t have the guts to do the right thing?”

Wanda was in shock. She’d raised her two sons to use their superior intelligence for the good of mankind.

Both tried to live close to nature. Then David, still in love with childhood sweetheart Linda Patrik, married her and became a social worker. But his lonely brother remained on the fringe of society, cut off from humanity.

Ted never found a woman,” Wanda told a friend. “His love for nature somehow turned into hatred for anybody whom he thought threatened it.

If he’d met the right woman, started his own family, I think he’d have been OK.”

The brothers’ relationships with girls seems to be the crucial difference between them, say sources.

High school classmates recall Ted was a genius bordering on Einstein levels” who felt out of place around girls.” While David ended up marrying Linda, friends say they can’t remember David dating anyone. Ironically, Ted’s bizarre fascination for bombs first surfaced in “gifts” to girls at Everergreen Park High, near Chicago.

A classmate, Jo Anne De Young, recalls an incident in chemistry class when Ted rolled up a piece of paper and twisted it in the middle after secretly putting chemicals inside. Ted handed her the roll and told her to unwind it.

“When I twisted it, there was like a pop,” she says. “The thing had gone off. like he made a little bomb.”

Ted pulled the same stunt the next day with another girl, she says. After that, the teacher cut off student access to chemical kits.

“I remember saying to Ted that ‘you should have been suspended.’“ she says, “He said: ‘I’m too smart.’“

Experts say that a happy marriage and Buddhism brought David Kaczynski the kind of social contact his brother shunned.

During the painful weeks leading up to his brother’s arrest, David and his wife prayed nightly at the KTC Buddhist Meditation and Study Center, where they would repeat a silent matra over an over again: “I send out happiness to human beings and take away the suffering of human beings.”

Sources say David began suspecting his brother might be the bomber after reading about the terrorist’s travels and history.

David saw his brother in the Unabomber’s published letters and the 35,000-word manifesto the bomber demanded be published in the New York Times and Washington Post.

He noticed familiar phrases and peculiar spellings used by his brother, in particular, the inversion of the cliche “have their cake and eat it too.” so it read “eat their cake and have it too.”

David became so suspicious, he hired a private investigator, Susan Swanson, last October. She gave five pages of transcribed letters written by the suspect to former FBI agent Clint Van Zandt. His analysis found an 80 percent probability the author also wrote the Unabomber’s manifesto.

David took the results to the FBI.

“I consider David to be a national hero.” says Van Zandt.

Meanwhile. Ted’s heartbroken mom is trying to understand what went wrong.

“He wanted to help people - not hurt them.” Wanda cried to friends. He was always on the side of people who were being persecuted.

“He loved the stories of Jesus healing the sick and feeding the hungry. What happened to him? Something happened to him.” -- Bob Michals, Joe Mullins and Ken Harrell

MADMAN HAD SOFT SPOT FOR CHILDREN

Even though Ted Kaczynski is accused of being a murderous monster, he was still kind to kids. The loner made toys for neighbor Butch Gehring’s kids. Jamie, now 16, and 3-year-old Tessa, then walked a half-mile through dense woods to deliver them-all with the same meticulous care he used to make killer mail bombs, say FBI agents.