The Various Players in Kaczynski’s Life Story

Ted Kaczynski

Full Name: Thedore John Kaczynski.

Former U.C. Berkeley professor. Ted is a true crime curiosity for the three people he’d never met who he coldly killed with his mail bombs, plus the manifesto he got newspapers to publish and his hermit life close to the wilderness.

Born: May 22, 1942, in Chicago. While still an infant, Kaczynski had a severe allergic reaction to medication. He was hospitalized in isolation for several days and allowed infrequent visits from his parents, during which they couldn’t hold or hug their child. The once-happy baby reportedly was never the same.

Childhood: Grew up in Evergreen Park, a suburb of Chicago, where his mother helped fire her oldest son’s intellectual drive. The pair would sit on the front stoop and read Scientific American together.

When he was about 12, Kaczynski dropped off a caged animal at neighbor Dorothy O’Connell’s home for her to watch while his family camped. He carried with him a copy of “Romping Through Mathematics from Addition to Calculus.”

Friends and neighbors have said the boy’s genius was apparent but his social skills severely lacking: “I would see him coming in the alley. He’d always walk by without saying hello. Just nothing,” said Dr. LeRoy Weinberg, a former Kaczynski neighbor. “Ted is a brilliant boy, but he was most unsociable ... This kid didn’t play. No, no. He was an old man before his time.”

But classmates said Kaczynski did horse around, albeit with chemicals, not toys: “We would go to the hardware store, use household products and make these things you might call bombs,” junior high classmate Dale Eickelman told the Daily Southtown, an Illinois newspaper, in 1996. “Once we created an explosion in a metal garbage can.”

While other young people listened to rock ‘n’ roll, Ted preferred classical music by Vivaldi and Bach that “had mathematical perfection and symmetry,” his brother, David, said in a January 1997 interview. “I can’t ever recall him singing songs or listening to lyrics.”

Education: Skipped two grades, graduating from high school in 1958 at the age of 16; earned bachelor’s from Harvard University in 1962. Earned master’s and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Professors have recalled Kaczynski as a brilliant graduate student able to solve complicated equations that stumped other math experts. Socially, he was a loner.

Career: Hired as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, on a two-year contract that started in the fall of 1967. Resigned without explanation in 1969.

“He said he was going to give up mathematics and wasn’t sure what he was going to do,” John W. Addison, then department chair, wrote in 1970 to Kaczynski’s dissertation adviser at the University of Michigan. “He was very calm and relaxed about it on the outside. We tried to persuade him to reconsider, but our presentation had no apparent effect.”

Addison called Kaczynski “almost pathologically shy,” a man who had made no close friends in the department.

Calvin Moore, vice chairman of the department in 1968, said that given Kaczynski’s “impressive” thesis and record of publications, “he could have advanced up the ranks and been a senior member of the faculty today.”

In a financial affidavit filed June 25, 1996, Kaczynski reported that he was unemployed, having last worked in 1979, when he earned $760 per month.

Published: Papers with such daunting titles as “Boundary Functions and Sets of Curvilinear Convergence for Continuous Functions” in prestigious math journals.

Life in Montana: With his brother, David, bought land in Lincoln, Mont., in 1971. Lived in a 10-by-12-foot ramshackle cabin he’d built himself with no electricity or running water. Mostly unemployed, surviving on a few hundred dollars a year, chopped wood for heat, hunted deer, food from his garden and cans of Spam and tuna. Rode a bike for transportation, sometimes dressed in overalls and a straw hat; in the winter used chains on his bicycle tires for traction or hitched a ride with a mail truck.

Teresa Brown, a sales clerk at Garland’s Town & Country store in the heart of Lincoln, described him as being “polite, shy, very nice.”

“Someone you’d never suspect, I guess, she said. “He was always alone.... I didn’t think he had any friends. I don’t even think he had a job, just a little lonely hermit up there.”

Occasionally, he would visit with Carol Blowars, a real estate broker who lived a quarter-mile away, and bring gifts to her and her husband, George. “He talked about his garden,” Blowars said. “He brought all kinds of things, carrots and spinach.”

“He was very highly educated, way beyond a level of anything I would read,” said Linda Bordeleau, a librarian’s assistant. “He read literary works. A lot of the books he wanted had to be ordered because they were extremely intellectual works. He would bring back his books and I would ask him: You can read and understand this stuff? I couldn’t.”

Communications: Instructed family members to draw a red line under the stamp if a letter contained urgent information. Such a letter came in 1990, after his father’s suicide. Kaczynski reportedly was upset because he felt the note didn’t warrant the urgent symbol. After his brother’s marriage in July 1990, Kaczynski wrote his brother a venomous letter stating, in capital letters, that he never wanted to see or hear from David or any other member of the Kaczynski family again. He has refused any contact with his mother or brother since his arrest.

Unrequited romance: Smitten with Ellen Tarmichael, a supervisor at a foam-rubber plant in Addison, Ill., where he worked while living with his family briefly in 1978. The two saw each other a few times socially before Tarmichael, who has since said there was no romance between the two, told Kaczynski that she no longer wanted to see him. Kaczynski made rude comments about Tarmichael at work and wrote rude limericks, which he hung around the plant until his supervisor — his brother, David — fired him. Kaczynski worked another job before moving back to Montana in 1979.

Residence: Curiously, since 1982, listed in Harvard’s alumni directory as Afghanistan. Now confined to a Sacramento County jail cell with a toilet, sink, running water and electric lights — comforts not found in his Montana cabin.

Recognition: Named on of the 25 Most Intriguing People of 1996 by People magazine.

Family: His terminally ill father, also named Theodore, committed suicide in 1990. His mother, Wanda, now lives in New York. Both were warm and nurturing “talkers,” who while their sons were growing up spoke often of the value of education and of the need to do what is right. “They weren’t rigid disciplinarians and by and large I don’t think they needed to be,” David Kaczynski has said. “Neither of their children ever created problems in the community or problems in school.”

Pleaded guilty: Jan. 22, 1998, in exchange for life in prison with no chance for parole; will be formally sentenced May 15, 1998.

On the plea bargain: “We feel it is the appropriate, just and civilized resolution to this tragedy, in light of Ted’s diagnosed mental illness,” his brother, David Kaczynski, said.

Related items:

• Suspect led hermit’s life in Montana (April 4, 1996)

• Rural acquaintances say Kaczynski attracted little notice (April 5, 1996)

• Many in Chicago suburb not surprised by arrest (April 5, 1996)

• Unabomber profile strikingly close to Kaczynski (April 7, 1996)

• Role in capture haunts Kaczynski’s brother (Jan. 19, 1997)

1950s

Family

David Kaczynski

The defendant’s younger brother who turned him in.

Cracking the case: The Unabomber’s manifesto struck a chord with David, who found the ideas and language similar to those expressed by his brother, Theodore, in conversations, letters and other writings. In early 1996, David took a train from New York to Chicago to help his mother clean out her house and pack for a move to New York. In a desk drawer, he found documents that added to his fears that his brother might be the Unabomber. He sought the help of an attorney friend from Washington, D.C., and eventually agreed to meet with FBI agents.

Impressions: “Everyone involved in this case is also eternally indebted to the heroic actions of David Kaczynski,” lead prosecutor Robert Cleary after Ted Kaczynski’s plea.

Born: Oct. 3, 1949, seven years after Ted, in Chicago.

Childhood: While his older brother was quiet and withdrawn, friends and neighbors from the Evergreen Park, Ill., neighborhood where the Kaczynskis grew up have described David as bright, outgoing and “happy-go-lucky.”

Still, the boys played friendly but competitive games of Monopoly and chess, David has recalled, and performed duets, with Ted on the trombone and his little brother on the trumpet. They loved word games, and Ted punned incessantly.

One of his earliest memories of Ted was when David was a toddler and his brother fashioned a special knob on the family’s screen door that the younger boy could reach.

Education: Earned an English degree from Columbia University.

Career: Assistant director for a program that provides shelter to youths in Schenectady, N.Y.

Kaczynski took some time off to deal with his feelings about what had happened, assist lawyers in the case, respond to an avalanche of letters he’d received from supporters and write letters to family members of the Unabomber’s victims.

An unwitting accomplice: Over the years, sometimes bought airline tickets for his brother. Two of those trips were to cities where the Unabomber struck.

A common thread: For four winters during the 1980s, lived in an earthen dwelling, covered by corrugated metal on an isolated plot of Texas land, while building a one-room cabin to escape his job in New York. Once the two-room cabin with limited electricity was completed, became a place where he worked on books and short stories, writing them in longhand.

“David wasn’t out here hiding away to plan revenge on the technophiles,” the Rev. Mel La Follette, an Episcopal priest who befriended David, told the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. “We’re people who like to sit in a rose garden instead of in front of a TV, people who like to have as many pets and animals as we like, people who like to look out and see mountains instead of high-rises. This is a place of people doing what they want to do.”

Beliefs: A Buddhist, fiercly committed environmentalist and strict vegetarian who doesn’t even eat eggs or dairy products.

Thoughts:

— On his involvement in his brother’s arrest:

“I know that my life has changed forever. It’s never going to be the same. And I know that I am going to be processing what has happened to me for the rest of my life.”

— On the possibility that he and his wife unwittingly may have helped fund some of the bombings:

“There is no question that my feeling of sorrow has been intensified by the thought that we may have assisted Ted, provided him with the means to do some of these things. That is an awful thought.”

— On the impact on his mother, Wanda:

“She is a very strong woman, an amazingly balanced woman considering the grief and trauma that she has been through. But she is very concerned about Ted. She wonders what Ted is feeling, what he may be suffering, particularly considering the isolation that he seems to have insisted upon.”

— On his relationship with Ted:

“There were times when he would invite me into his world, take me up to his room and show me the books that he was reading, or invite me to go for a walk, and it was as if I had been given a rare privilege that other people did not have.”

— On coming to the decision to turn Ted in to authorities:

“It’s agony when you love someone, when you want what’s best for them, you want to protect them, and yet you are afraid that they may be hurting other people. Certainly my interest from the beginning was to protect life.”

— On reading the Unabomber manifesto:

“I read it twice in two days, and another time before the week was over, and I felt a growing sense of dismay.”

Married: To Linda Patrik in a Buddhist ceremony in the couple’s back yard in Schenectady, N.Y., on July 14, 1990. The marriage angered Ted, who wrote his brother a venomous letter stating, in capital letters, that he never wanted to see or hear from David or any other member of the Kaczynski family again.

Honored: Sept. 23, 1997, in Albany, N.Y., for his courage in turning in his brother to the FBI. While accepting the award, David promised that if Ted were convicted and he received the government’s $1 million reward, he would give the money to Unabom survivors and victims’ families.

Related items:

• Kaczynski’s family began own probe (April 9, 1996)

• Role in capture haunts Kaczynski’s brother (Jan. 19, 1997)

• Victim kin may get Unabomber reward (Sept. 24, 1997)

Wanda Kaczynski

Ted Kaczynski Senior

Aunt Freda

Freda Dombek Tuominen.

Ted Kaczynski:[1]

I sent my drawing to Aunt Freda. You weren’t sure whether I should send it to Hoken and Jean, and I feel sorry for Aunt Freda cause she’s had a hard life, and she was always nice to me when I was a small child. If she doesn’t find the drawing cheering, at least it ought to give her an erotic kick. And I know she’s no prude and will not object to a dirty picture. I mean, you know, those old folk like any mark of consideration--even one that is a little unconventional.

Beau Freidlander:[2]

Since it is perfectly clear that the information about is central to your thesis, and it also clear that your aunt is against the publication of this fact and has evidence that it is not true. In addition, your aunt is not willing to allow information that sets the record straight to be published. Her feeling is that it would upset greatly if she were to know that your brother thought she was schizophrenic, end of story.

Kathleen Kaczynski Withers

Listed in Envelope X, but missing from the original draft of this book that Context Books typed up. Envelope X is described as including “a list giving the real names of people whom I have identified in this book by first names, initials, or abbreviations.” But perhaps they’re referred to in earlier handwritten drafts or some other notes contained within the ‘Refutation Documents’ category of documents housed at the University of Michigan.

Uncle Ben

Ted Kaczynski:[3]

The only relative outside of the immediate family whom I’ve known at all well is my Uncle Ben. He’s sort of a screwball and I always enjoyed his company when I was younger because he would enter so actively into my play and was always so hilarious. But the last couple of years I haven’t cared for him so much any more. I don’t know whether It’s because he’s become more of a screwball or because I’ve just outgrown him, so to speak.

Ted’s Childhood

Ralph Meister

Ted Kaczynski’s father’s close friend. And Ted wrote to him from prison.

Dale Eickelman

Quoting Ted:[4]

Eickelman, now a professor at Dartmouth College, told my investigators that “Teddie did not have other friends [than Dale Eickelman] during the time that Dale knew Teddie from 5^th grade until Teddie’s sophomore year [of college].” ... Professor Eickelman correctly states that I visited his home during the summer following my freshman year at Harvard.

So, Ted’s longest childhood friend became a distinguished professor of anthropology, a field of study that Ted read zealously from the age of 11. Ted found in our hunter-gatherer past an ideal which if had been allowed to continue, to his mind, would have prevented the existence of a life full of humiliating experiences. Experiences, such as alleged bullying by other kids and his parents which he felt he was conditioned into not responding violently to:[5]

Unquestionably there is no doubt that the reason I dropped out of the technological system is because I had read about other ways of life, in particular that of primitive peoples. When I was about eleven I remember going to the little local library in Evergreen Park, Illinois. They had a series of books published by the Smithsonian Institute that addressed various areas of science. Among other things, I read about anthropology in a book on human prehistory. I found it fascinating. After reading a few more books on the subject of Neanderthal man and so forth, I had this itch to read more. I started asking myself why and I came to the realization that what I really wanted was not to read another book, but that I just wanted to live that way....

In living close to nature, one discovers that happiness does not consist in maximizing pleasure. It consists in tranquility. Once you have enjoyed tranquility long enough, you acquire actually an aversion to the thought of any very strong pleasure—excessive pleasure would disrupt your tranquility.

Finally, one learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.

Along with this, social ineptitude and sexual frustration played a large part in pushing Ted over the edge into desiring to start killing people. So Dale being the first person he experimented with sexually, and the person who played a recurring role in his sexual fantasies is I think worth deciphering.

Content warning for the graphic recounting of his childhood sexual development:[6]

When we first moved to Evergreen Park, there was a boy ... who lived nearby. A couple of times this kid persuaded me to go out in the prairie and strip with him ... in the end I did strip, and found it sexually exciting, as he did. Apparently this kind of stripping was a common practice among the boys around there ... There was a kid named Dale ... I suppose we were about 13 when this kid first persuaded me to strip with him. At first I wasn’t interested, but by and by I got excited and went along. This kind of thing was repeated several times. At that age I was already suffering from acute sexual starvation, ...

... Anyhow, I never did get a girlfriend — or even one date — at Harvard. Consequently, I suffered considerably from acute sexual starvation. I found by experience that I could not study well in Widener library, because my thoughts were too much distracted by the sight of female behinds swaying up and down the aisle. All-male Lamont Library was a refuge for me; but even there on many days my ability to study was severely impaired by a tendency for my thoughts to wander off into day dreams about girls.

I was never attracted by the idea of going to a prostitute. I felt there would be no point in having intercourse unless the woman wanted it too. But even if I had wanted a prostitute, I would have had no idea how to find one ...

... At home in my room, when I got sexually excited, I would either fantasy a variety of oral and anal sexual perversions with either a male or female partner or an animal, or I would fantasy normal intercourse. In imagining normal intercourse, I might put myself either in the male role or in the female role. In imagining myself in the male role, I usually imagined myself as having a greater or lesser amount of affection for the girl. (But still my desires toward girls were mostly just physical ...

... I might imagine myself living a stone-age life all alone in some far wilderness; then I find a beautiful girl off in the woods, injured or in some other danger or difficulty; I rescue her, nurse her back to health, and make her my mate. Fantasies of myself as female had a completely different character. Usually I imagined myself as a sexually hot but unloving female, using her sexual power to seduce males. In many cases I imagined my sex partner as being Dale Eikelman (seep. 50 of these notes), and except when provisionally submitting to him intercourse, I imagined myself as dominating him physically ... in fantasies of myself as a female, the emphasis was always on myself as a girl — the man in the fantasy only served to provide a prick. I have never been sexually attracted to men ...

... By my third year at Michigan, though I still could hardly keep my eyes off good-looking girls, I had closed my heart against them. Since I felt sure I would never have any kind of sexual relationship with any of them, it was less painful, frustrating, and humiliating to simply close off all hope and hate all good-looking women ...

... finally I got disgusted with the whole thing, and angry, and said to myself, “What am I doing here working up a sweat trying to phone some stupid broad. It’s an indignity. To hell with it. I don’t need any damn women.” This incident was a major step in making me completely hopeless about ever getting a girlfriend. I tended to close my heart against women. (Against people generally, for that matter ...

During my U. of Michigan period I no longer felt ashamed of my perverted sexual fantasies in the same way that I did at the age of, say 15. That is, I still felt more or less revulsion after orgasm associated with a perverted fantasy; and I felt thoroughly and strongly disgusted after orgasm whenever I had spent a long period playing with perversions, especially when I feared I might be damaging my health through prolonged accelerated heartbeat and prolonged erection, or when I wasted, on perversion, time that I should have spent on some task. But, on the other hand, when I looked back on my sexual fantasies and activities from a little distance of time, I no longer felt any particular shame about them. Though of course I was very careful to keep these activities concealed, since I knew how other people would react to them ...

... As for sex, at Berkeley, I rarely practiced perversions or had prolonged sex-fantasies, because I would usually masturbate promptly whenever I got excited, so that sex didn’t get much grip on me.

My sex fantasies were either of having normal intercourse with a woman, or of being a woman myself and having intercourse that way.

So, five years into studies at Michigan, and concerned about being drafted to Vietnam where he feared he might in a fit of rage shoot some bullying sergeant, the stresses of a life he’d felt pressured into, and was incapable of socially adapting to, all bubbled over:[7]

Alone in his room, he was driven crazy by the sounds of the couple next door making love. Finally—and this is what broke my heart—Kaczynski decided to convince a psychiatrist to allow him to undergo the surgery and chemical treatments he thought would transform him into a woman, not because he was transgender, but because, as a woman, he might wrap his arms around himself and be held by someone female.

Kaczynski kept his appointment with the psychiatrist, only to realize he was going mad. Furious at a society that had pushed him to excel in academics at the cost of his ability to find love and connection to other human beings, he vowed to stop being such a good boy and learn to kill. Only later did he come up with an ideology that justified his murderous rage, lashing out at science and industrialization for destroying our environment, pressuring us to conform, depriving us of our privacy, and robbing us of our humanity.

Finally, Dale has written all kinds of great analysis of the social dynamics of people growing up within socially conservative Islamic cultures. So, as well travelled and knowledgeable a person he is, he’d be the perfect person to draw insights back to the hometown he and Ted grew up in.

Here are some of the early adverse experiences Ted faced, quoting Ted:[8]

... Until I was, say, 5 or 6 years old, I think my father was warm and affectionate toward me ... However, as I grew older, my father began to refrain from physical expressions of affection toward me, and a certain element of coldness sometimes appeared in his behavior ... One day, when I might have been about 6 years old, my mother, father, and I were all set to go out somewhere. I was in a joyful mood. I ran up to my father and announced that I wanted to kiss him. He said, ‘You’re like a little girl, always wanting to kiss.’ I immediately turned cold and drew back resentfully. My father immediately regretted what he had done and said, ‘Oh, that’s alright. You can kiss if you want to.’ But there was no warmth in his voice. Of course, I didn’t kiss him then. I recall after that there was a period of a few years when I had a marked aversion to kissing.... the reader should be careful not to get an exaggerated idea of the coldness that my father occasionally exhibited — generally speaking I felt I had a good relationship with my parents that didn’t show any serious deterioration until I was about 11 years old ... Ever since very early childhood I was attracted to the woods and to the idea of being physically independent of society. My father was fond of the woods and I have memories, going back very early, of pleasant excursions with him ...

... As far back as I can remember, my view of girls and women always included a substantial element of contempt ... it was a contempt for femininity as a general concept. represented weakness ... Having observed that women were more passive and physically weaker, my liking for power and aggression would naturally incline me toward contempt for the feminine ...

Be that as it may, I did skip 6^th grade. It seems fairly obvious that it was this event which eventually led to my becoming practically a social cripple and deprived me of sex, love, and (perhaps) marriage ...

On the other hand, it is possible that the consequences of this event hardened me. It is also possible that, if I had never skipped 6^th grade, I’d never have broken away from society and taken to the woods; in which case I think I would ultimately have felt my life to be empty and unsatisfactory, no matter how much love and marriage I might have.

But now we are slipping into the realm of conjecture. Who can tell what course my life would have taken? ...

... once I was in 7^th grade, I quickly slid to the bottom of the pecking-order ... jealousy was probably roused by the fact that I was supposed to be vastly smarter than them; and my shyness in a new situation may have been interpreted as coldness or a superior air ... By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body. I was subject to very little physical abuse ...

... Soon after entering 7^th grade I became thoroughly cowed (as I said, I was at the bottom of the pecking-order), and I stayed that way all through high school. I was usually afraid to defend myself when insulted or abused, unless the offenders were (like me) in the lower part of the pecking-order .., instead of becoming aggressive, I simply ignored the insults as best I could ...

... This was a purely social problem — it had nothing to do with any lack of physical courage. It was some psychological mechanism connected with dominance — relationships ... I am rather lightly built ay, and being with kids first one year older and later 2 years older than me pm:: me at a great disadvantage in muscle ...

... After finishing 10^th grade, I was put into 12^th grade, thus finishing high school in 3 years ... I felt less hostility toward me among the 12^th-graders (but I still had plenty of opportunity to receive hostility from the 11^th-graders).

However, many of the 12^th graders were condescending toward me, and this was at least as bad as the hostility of my earlier classmates.... Not daring to fight back, and not wishing to show weakness, my only choice in the face of hostility was to be cold and stoical ... The cold impression was often accentuated by shyness, and I suspect that my apparent cold aloofness may have alienated some kids who might otherwise have been friendly ...

... In my early teens I conducted my search for power by experimenting with home-made explosives surreptitiously, without my parents’ permission ... couple of incidents in school.... On one occasion in Chemistry lab I finished my experiment early, and then set to thinking about explosives....

I suspect that I had quite a reputation in high school. In fact, there is reason to suspect that in some quarters of the student body, knowing me even conferred a kind of left-banded prestige — the kind of prestige that one might get from being personally acquainted with the Devil. with a mad genius, as I was supposed to be.) ...

Now here is some of Dale’s writing relevant to how different cultures dealt with young people having difficult early experiences:[9][10]

Reason grows in a person with his ability to perceive the social order and to discipline himself to act effectively within it. Proper social comportment within this framework is symbolized by the concept of theshsham, or hshumiya. These terms approximate the English concept of propriety (which is the translation I give to the terms when used in the abstract), although they are also used in contexts where the English terms deference, respect, circumspection, and occasionally embarrassment would be fitting.

The locus of propriety is not so much the inner moral consciousness of a person as his public comportment with respect to those with whom he has regular face-to-face relations. A person is said to lack propriety when he is caught outside the image which he is expected to project of himself before “significant others.” Maintenance of “proper” comportment reflects one’s possession of reason.

Like reason, propriety is a quality which persons acquire as they mature. It is inculcated by parents, especially the father, and to a certain extent by other relatives and outsiders. This is achieved both by suggestion and, on occasion, by the use of physical force. As a son acquires reason, he is expected increasingly to show deference toward his father in the household and in public.

Before boys are taken to the mosque and initiated in the fast, fathers as well as mothers play with their sons and show affection and tenderness (Jianana) toward them. As a boy matures, only the women of the household, especially his mother, continue manifestly to display affection toward him. Mothers and sons develop strong, expressed ties of affection: widowed or divorced mothers frequently live with their sons and look to them for moral and economic support. It is believed that if a father were to continue to be affectionate with his son as he matured, the son “would become soft like a woman, allowing others to dominate him [st‘amaru]. Thus the father increasingly assumes a greater formality with his son and becomes hard [qaseh] with him.

As a boy matures, he increasingly strives to avoid situations in which his father or other persons can exercise domination over him. This often entails tacit public avoidance of the father, even when the son continues to live in the same household. This avoidance continues after a son becomes economically autonomous and establishes his own household. It does not indicate active hostility so much as a desire to avoid situations in which the son, himself the head of a household, is placed in a position in which his own “word” must be circumscribed. On the marriage of a son, the father avoids those aspects of the celebration which would bring him into direct contact with his son. He generally sits with his friends in a separate room, away from the female dancers (shikha-s’) and musicians usually called in for the celebration. Direct contact between father and son on such an occasion is thought to be highly improper.

Propriety is similarly related to subordination and restraint outside of the household. Among examples of impropriety are acts of adultery, homosexuality, or other illicit sexual exploits, at least if they become publicly known; fighting in the street; being caught in the act of stealing; and various forms of deceit and exploitation. These are considered less as “immoral” than as “improper” acts. It is their public knowledge which is the subject of greatest concern, since, as one Boujadi said, only God knows the true motivation of a person’s actions.

As suggested thus far in this chapter, ideologies of sexuality involve complex dimensions, including notions of domination, authority, intimacy, friendship, economic hegemony, and other essential definitions of, and practical control over, self and social honor.

Nonetheless, or possibly because sexuality in the Middle East as elsewhere is such a crucial component of notions of self, it is difficult to elaborate a more comprehensive discussion of the issue because of the lack of a solid base on which to build. So little reliable discussion has taken place to date in the scholarly literature on the Middle East that Burton’s “Terminal Essay” to his translation of 1001 Nights—an encyclopedic inventory of hearsay and what he considered to be the sexual wonders and extravagances of the “Sotadic Zone” (a region which for him stretched from Tokyo to Tangier, his “Orient”)—is astonishingly referred to even today as authoritative in some general books on the region. Most discussions of sexual conduct make cursory references to male and female homosexuality and other forms of sex, as when Snouck Hurgronje wrote of nineteenth-century Mecca that there were many men “who gave themselves up, to the vice called after Lot” and their female counterparts as well. The “Orient” writ large was used as a screen against which Western images of its supposed excesses could be projected. Pilgrimages such as that made by Andre Gide in 1893 to Algeria in search of the “golden fleece” of moral and sexual liberation only served to reinforce the Western notion of the “Orient” as different and exotic, in sexuality as in other spheres.

Such images persist in the travel literature of the present, as when Gavin Maxwell suggests that the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq “are not very selective in their direction of sexual outlet; all is, so to speak, grist to their mill.” With sexuality treated superficially as the exotic, it is not surprising that even nineteenth-century ethnographers such as Snouck Hurgronje noted that Middle Easterners, especially educated ones, spoke with circumspection concerning sexual attitudes and beliefs. As ethnography, isolated comments such as those I have cited above only underscore how little is known of sexuality in theory or conduct.

A sketch of what a comprehensive study of sexuality should be and an indication at least of the documentary sources on which it could be built is provided by the Tunisian sociologist, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba. His La Sexualitken Islam (Sexuality in Islam) analyzes attitudes toward sexuality in the medieval Islamic world and in the contemporary period both through texts and (by reference to a few relevant colonial and contemporary studies of Tunisia alone) sociological accounts. He insists that although the Islamic community considers itself rightly as a unity, Islam is fundamentally “plastic” in its essence, so that nothing of the ambiguities of existence or of life are “sacrificed,” including the serious and playful, collective and individual components of sexuality. For Bouhdiba, one can speak of a Malay Islam, an Arab Islam, and Iranian Islam, a Tunisian Islam, and other Islams, each of which suggests essential comportments and attitudes which cannot be reduced to “folklore.” His text is resplendent with suggestions of how the sexual dimension of identity has been elaborated in the context of various expressions of Islamic belief and practice and a multiplicity of social structures.

Russell Mosny

Ted:[11]

I hung around with Russell Mosny quite a bit, but I never liked him much. We tended to be thrown together because we were in many of the same classes and were both “brains” who were treated with contempt by the “tough” kids. Both Mosny and George Duba seemed to become cool toward me during my last year or so of high school ...

Linda Dybas & The Dybas Family

Ted:[12]

In some cases it is difficult to disentangle the effect of “remembering later years” from that of “media planting.” Thus, Linda Dybas, the daughter of one of my father’s best friends, told investigators: “Ted Jr. was a very shy and quiet boy. He was introverted and only involved himself in things he could do alone.” Here and throughout her interview, Linda Dybas exaggerates my shyness and introversion to the point of caricature. Most likely this is the result of media planting. Yet “remembering later years” would seem to be involved too, since Linda Dybas appears to have forgotten completely the earlier years when I was not particularly shy or introverted and we were lively playmates. I wrote the following in 1979:

“I might have been about 9 years old when the following incident occurred. My family was visiting the Dybas family. The Dybas‘s had a little girl named Linda, about my own age. At that time she was very pretty. I was horsing around with her, and by and by I got to tickling her. I put my arms around her from behind and tickled her under the ribs. I tickled and tickled, and she squirmed and laughed. I pressed my body up against hers, and experienced a very pleasant, warm, affectionate sensation, distinctly sexual. Unfortunately, my mother caught on to the fact that our play was beginning to take on a sexual character. She got embarrassed and told me to stop tickling Linda. Linda said, ‘No, don’t make him stop! I like it!’ but, alas, my mother insisted, and I had to quit.”

Adam Krokos

Ted:[13]

From age one to three I developed a close friendship with Adam Krokos, a boy about eight months older than I was. The attachment left a long–lasting impression on both of us. He was the son of the couple who occupied the first floor of the house of which my parents and I had the second story; when we moved to another house I was separated from him.

Barbara Podejma

Ted:[14]

In the new house we again occupied the second story, and with the little girl downstairs, Barbara Podejma, I formed another strong attachment, though it was not as strong as my attachment to Adam.

Jackie

Ted:[15]

Jackie was the four–year–old boy referred to on p. 1 of Ted’s 1979 Autobiography:
After we moved to our second home on Marshfield, I remember playing outside with another little boy who bragged about being 4 years old, telling me that I was “only three”. I knew that I was not as old as 4, nor as young as 2, which logically forced me to [unreadable] the idea that I was “only three”, but under the circumstances I was not willing to admit to myself or anybody else that I was “only three”. Later I asked my mother about this and she explained ...

Walter Teszewski

Ted:[16][17]

My mother imitated him in this respect, and from then on until I was about 21 years old, both my parents would apply to me such epithets as “sick”, “immature”, “emotionally disturbed,” “creep,” “mind of a two–year–old,” or “another Walter Teszewski.” (Walter Teszewski was a man we knew who ended up in a mental institution.)

But contrary to what the FBI says my brother told them, I was compared to Walter Teszewski only twice, and in at least one of those cases it was my mother who made the comparison.

The Mirror:[18]

In the shack, agents discovered bus-ticket stubs to Sacramento — scene of the last Unabomber attack — electrical wiring of the sort used in his devices and some anti-science literature.

They also discovered evidence of aliases he used — Walter Teszewski II and Ted Dombek among them.

— Carpenter Street —

Johnny Krolak

Bobby Thomas

Freddy Dorfert

Jimmy Burke

Larry Landers

Mary Kay Foley.

Frank Howell

Terry La Chance

Rosario

(an Italian kid whose last name I do not remember)

Peter Malotte

Darlene Curley

Ted:[19]

Also in fifth grade, I carried on an intense flirtation with a beautiful female classmate named Darlene Curley. Because she teased me and provoked me, I loved her and hated her at the same time. She gradually began to conquer me, however, and love undoubtedly would have won out in the end if circumstances hadn’t separated us. What happened was that upon completing fifth grade I was placed directly in seventh, and after that I rarely saw Darlene.

Byron Oswald

— School —

Dale Johnson

Bob Carlson

Barbara Brabanac

Larry Schaeffer

Bob Pettis

Ted:[20]

Apart from those already mentioned, a list of my friends from seventh grade through high school would include Bob Pettis, Tom Knudson, Jerry Ulrich, and George Duba.

Tom Knudson

Ted:[21]

Apart from those already mentioned, a list of my friends from seventh grade through high school would include Bob Pettis, Tom Knudson, Jerry Ulrich, and George Duba.

Jerry Ulrich

Ted:[22]

Apart from those already mentioned, a list of my friends from seventh grade through high school would include Bob Pettis, Tom Knudson, Jerry Ulrich, and George Duba.

Harvard Years

Roy Wright

Unabomber; In His Own Words:[23]

ROY: He was a bit on the shy side, but definitely not antisocial. Once he got to know you — not once you got to know him — once he got to know you, he could talk and talk. And we were talking about things that weren’t trivial, they weren’t bullshit, they were just, they were about what was right and wrong. And Ted was concerned, and was more savvy than I was, about corporate and, and governmental impact on the environment and on… and on us. And some of the ideas that he articulated later, I distinctly have memories of talking about.

KACZYNSKI: You can’t live as a free person as a member of a large-scale system. There is another way to live and you don’t have to live the way we do in this system. I’ve been anti-technology ever since 1962. My last year at Harvard was the year when I definitely decided I was against technology.

It was at this time that Ted Kaczynski began to show increasing signs of withdrawal.

ROY: One roommate said that, uh, if they went down to the dining hall and… saw him there and sat down with him, he’d just-they never saw anybody finish his food faster and without saying a word, would just leave. You know, so I felt hurt at first that, that he had just sort of ignored or, or obliterated our friendship, but I wasn’t alone. I mean, he was… he was not just shy, now he was really antisocial.

Wayne Person

Ted:[24]

Wayne Person, Pat McIntosh, John Masters, and Keith Martin formed a close–knit clique within the suite. To all outward appearances they were thoroughly well–adjusted. They wore neatly–kept suits and ties, their rooms were always tidy, they observed all of the expected social amenities, their attitudes, opinions, speech, and behavior were so conventional that I found them completely uninteresting. Yet three of the four gave my investigators a glimpse of their psychological problems....

Wayne Person “was shy and socially backward when he went to Harvard and feared that he would never fully come out of his shell.... He had a strong desire to lead a normal life. Wayne Person was an astronomy major. He originally intended to pursue astronomy on the graduate level but his fears drove him away from that goal. He saw that many of the astronomy graduate students at Harvard were not well–adjusted and he felt he would move further away from a normal life if he pursued astrophysics.

Pat McIntosh

Ted:[25]

Pat McIntosh, according to the investigators’ report, did a great deal of whining throughout his interview about how hard it was to survive academically and psychologically at Harvard. For example: “[Pat] found life at Harvard to be extremely difficult... Patrick [had] his own adolescent insecurities... Patrick was too insecure and wrapped up in his own problems ... The faculty or administration at Harvard was ... unconcerned with students’ emotional and psychological problems. Patrick did not know any students who actually sought and received emotional help ... At times, Patrick wanted help surviving himself, but he had no idea where to go. John Finley, the house master ... didn’t want to recognize the serious difficulties that many of the students were having.”

McIntosh evidently assumes that I was having problems similar to his own: “One day during Patrick’s second year at Harvard ... he saw a student being taken out on a stretcher. The student had slit his wrists after receiving a C on an exam ... Patrick ... thought of Ted and worried that maybe Ted might end up like this kid.”

John Masters

Ted:[26]

John Masters told the investigators that he “was two years old when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. After that he used to dream about the atomic bomb; these dreams sparked John’s desire of becoming a nuclear physicist but after he barely earned a C in his freshman physics class at Harvard, he decided that he was not cut out for a career in the hard sciences... During John’s first semester of his sophomore year at Harvard, his family began to fall apart. He became very depressed for several months and started receiving therapy at the student health services”.

When John Masters first moved into Eliot N–43 he mentioned having been in “the hospital.” I asked him what he had been in the hospital for, and he answered, “just nervousness.” Like McIntosh, Masters made false statements about me and exaggerated my solitariness. According to the investigators’ report of his interview, “House Master Finley ... did not intervene on John’s behalf when John needed counseling. The same was probably true for Ted. Ted’s solitary nature failed to draw Master Finley’s attention because diversity or unusual behavior was accepted at Harvard. John believes that today Ted’s solitary behavior would warrant some type of intervention; at the time, his behavior did not even raise an eyebrow.... John’s solitary lifestyle meant that he did not make more than five friends while at Harvard.”

Keith Martin

Ted:[27]

Wayne Person, Pat McIntosh, John Masters, and Keith Martin formed a close–knit clique within the suite.

Henry Murray

- [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/studies-of-stressful-interpersonal-disputations][Studies of stressful interpersonal disputations]

• Ted Kaczynski’s 1959 Autobiography

• Henry Murray’s ‘Dyadic Session #12’ with Ted Kaczynski

• Individuality: The Meaning and Content of Individuality in Contemporary America

• The Personality and Career of Satan

Kenneth Keniston

Ted:[28]

During my sophomore year I was talked into becoming a participant (against my better judgment) in a psychological study directed by the late Professor Henry A. Murray.... Anyway, all I know at the moment about the psychologists’ conclusions is that I was included in an “ideologically alienated” group that was discussed by Kenneth Keniston in his book The Uncommitted.... according to Keniston, members of his alienated group reported a “strong sense of cosmic outcastness ...[and] self–estrangement. “[327] I have never had or reported any such feelings.

John H. Finley

Ted:[29]

So much for my freshman year. During my three subsequent years at Harvard I lived at Eliot House. In connection with my applications for renewal of my scholarship, John Finley, Master of the house, wrote two brief evaluations, one at the end of my sophomore year and the other at the end of my junior year:

“Beyond achieving his fairly good record of an A, two B’s and a C at midyears (the first and last respectively in Math. 20 and Physics 12c), Kaczynski’s chief activity is to have grown a wispish beard and to practice the trumpet. [Sic; it was a trombone, not a trumpet.] He is fairly good at it, and the mournful strains float down from the rooms above our house where he lives. He is pretty lonely, I fear, despite efforts of roommates, to whom I have spoken of him. [I was not aware of any “efforts” on the part of my roommates.] One may see him occasionally in the corner of the Dining Hall sitting with his back to the room. He is a year younger than many of his classmates [sic; actually two years] and may yet show the talent that might justify such isolation. Meanwhile, he remains pretty sad. Perhaps his life is brighter to him than it seems to others—I devoutly hope so.

“June 7, 1960 John H. Finley.”

“His midyear performance of three A’s and a B (the A’s in Mathematics and Quine’s Logic) begin to justify the curious act of imagination that got him here. For some reason one no longer hears this year the strains of his trumphet [sic] from our top floor, and the wispish beard has vanished. He is still pretty lonely but less friendless than he was a year ago. He turned nineteen only at the end of May and has had to overcome both youth and simple upbringing. His excellent and mounting marks argue high inner strength; he should begin to find himself fully in Graduate School. All very gallant, touching, and memorable.

“June 6, 1961 John H. Finley.”

Ellen Arl

Ted:[30][31][32]

At the age of 19 to 20 I had a girlfriend; the only one I ever had, I regret to say. Her name was Ellen Arl. She was an Evergreen Park resident, not someone I met in college. I went out with her a number of times during the summer following my junior year at Harvard. I saw her once the following summer; that meeting went badly and she broke off the relationship.

Ellen Arl (see Chapter 6) once told me that “everyone” was jealous of me, presumably referring to the people whom we both knew, including George Duba and Russell Mosny, both of whom seemed to become cool toward me at about the time I moved a year ahead of them in school.

On one occasion I held hands with her. Finally, on the last date before I went back to Harvard, realizing that this would be the last chance I would have for months, I had sufficient nerve to ask her for a kiss. She agreed of course, so I just put my arm d her shoulders and pressed my mouth against hers. She ground lips into mine, so to speak, by turning her head back and forth in a kind of circular motion. At that time, I hadn’t realized that that is how a sexual kiss is ordinarily performed. I had seen it done that way in the movies, of course, but I had assumed that that was only a Hollywood affectation, a show that they put on, just like the fancy clothes and other romantic ostentation. I wondered whether Ellen had borrowed the idea of kissing that way from the movies. I would have felt foolish doing anything in imitation of things I had seen in the movies.

Anyway, I enjoyed that kiss very much. It was the first good sexual experience I had ever had (unless you want to count the time I tickled Linda Dybas when I was 9 or 10).

Masturbation, sex fantasies, sexual perversions (whether private or with Dale Eikelman) — all these were frustrating and unsatisfying experiences.

The limited pleasure that I got out of them was not enough to compensate for the frustration resulting from the fact that I was not getting what I wanted. But kissing girls is different. The pleasure and satisfaction I get from it is more than enough to compensate for the fact that I wish I were getting a lot more than just kisses. Alas, there have been only 4 occasions in my life when I have had the opportunity for such enjoyment — twice with Ellen Arl (but there were many individual kisses on the second occasion), and twice with Ellen Tarmichael ...

George Duba

Ted:[33][34]

I was close to George Duba only during one school year.

Several former students at Evergreen Park Community High School who were interviewed by investigators confirmed that academically–oriented kids were harassed and insulted.... George Duba’s reports of bitter personal experiences should probably be given weight as showing the existence of harassment, even though there is no way of knowing whether the reports are accurate in detail.

Montana Years

Dr. Lynden Heitz

Ted Kaczynski’s dentist who practiced part of the time in Lincoln, Montana.

Renee Campbell

A dental assistant to Dr. Lynden Heitz, Ted Kaczynski’s dentist who practiced part of the time in Lincoln, Montana.

Glen WIlliams

Owned a cabin not far from Ted’s.

— Lincoln residents Ted also wrote to from prison —

Sherri Wood

Sherri Wood was the librarian where Ted lived in Lincoln, Montana.

Here’s a letter she sent Ted on February 2^nd, 1998:[35]

“[O]ne day a reporter came in [to the library] from the Sacramento Bee and asked for an interview and we told him no. Then he asked us for just some general information about you and the arrest, and the town, just for background information. He said that it would be off the record. I said ok, and went to file books as we talked. After a while I heard Mary ask him why he was writing if this was all off record and then he said he had changed his mind and decided to put it on record. We both immediately shut up and then asked him to leave, after we told him what a rat we thought he was. He did then go on to print an article and made it sound like I gave him an interview voluntarily.... I do not trust the press ....”

Dick and Eileen Lundberg

2 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Los Angeles Times:[36]

Sometimes Ted would go to Helena. He went with Dick Lundberg, a mail carrier who has been serving Lincoln since 1965. Lundberg drove what townspeople call the Lincoln stage. At least once a year, Ted rode with him to Helena to buy a large load of groceries. “He’d buy, oh, canned goods, dry foods and stuff like that,” Lundberg says. “Sometimes big boxes of dry milk. Staples....

“I’d drive him in one day and back the next,” Lundberg says. “He’d always stay at the Park Hotel.” It was downtown, on a street called Last Chance Gulch. Ted stayed there 31 times in the 15 years between 1980 and 1995. He always rented the cheapest room available, which started at $9 a night in the early years and crept up in $1 increments until it cost $14 last year. Nearly half the time, he rented Room 119, with no bath, no phone and no TV. It was right off the lobby.

It was clean but more than a little depressing. Its most recent decor was a napless brown carpet tinged with orange, a dark brown bureau under a mirror, a small, scarred brown desk that did not match, a lamp with a fake parchment shade, an orange chair and a red vinyl chair with chrome arms. A small pastel picture of Indians on horses hung over the desk, and a dim autumn landscape hung over the bed, which had a cream bedspread decorated with orange and gold flowers. Against a wall was a small white sink. Under the window stood a radiator. It was painted silver.

“When he first started coming here in 1980, I had a little uneasiness,” says Jack McCabe, the owner. “Was he going to run right down to the bar and get drunk and then pick up a girl and try to sneak her up here? I don’t tolerate that. After a couple of times, I forgot about him. He was always quiet and polite. Didn’t smoke or drink, didn’t do anything. Wouldn’t even talk.

“He always wore the same type of clothing, Levi jacket, Levi pants, all dark. His bag was dark colored, too. It wasn’t very big, about the size you could put a basketball in. He would always check out by 11 a.m.”

Sometimes Ted did not ride back to Lincoln with Lundberg. When that happened, Lundberg assumed he had come home with someone else.

The Park Hotel, however, was within walking distance of a regional bus station. Cheap transportation was available to Butte, Missoula and Bozeman. From there, buses went to cities throughout the West and the rest of the nation.

In Butte, Tom Gilbert, a ticket agent for Greyhound, says another agent and at least two drivers recall seeing Ted getting on buses.

Jamie Gehring

• Madman in the Woods by Jamie Gehring

• I Grew Up Next To The Unabomber. I Felt Such Anger Toward Him — So Why Am I Grieving His Death? by Jamie Gehring

• Jamie Gehring’s Letters To & From Ted Kaczynski

1978

Illinois

Dale Edwards

Ted:[37]

My brother used to hold literary “colloquia,” as he called them. He and a few friends would all read some piece of literature that one of them had selected, then they would get together and discuss it. The participants varied, but the most usual ones were my brother, my parents, Dale Edwards, Hokan Edwardson and Jeanne Edwardson. I attended one and only one of these colloquia. This was shortly after I arrived at my parents’ home in Lombard, Illinois in 1978.

Hokan Edwardson

Jeanne Edwardson

Dan Edwardson

Ted:[38]

[H]ere is what my brother wrote to me in 1984, shortly after Dan’s suicide:

“I’ve been feeling kind of depressed the last couple of weeks since learning that Jeanne’s brother Dan committed suicide. As he lived with Hokan Edwardson and Jeanne, and didn’t have a regular job, I spent quite a bit of time with him during my two visits in Rockport. We ... often talked about philosophy. …

“[I]t was hard getting through to Dan. On the other hand, he seemed to have a message he was trying to get across, and which he didn’t feel that I, Hokan Edwardson, or anyone had yet appreciated adequately. So he must have felt a similar frustration with us, in answer to which, according to Hokan Edwardson, he seemed to be withdrawing from everyone more and more during the last couple of years. Hokan Edwardson seemed to think that Dan’s suicide was a ‘rational act’—i.e. that it was a consequence of his ideas. The arresting thing for would–be intellectuals, such as Hokan Edwardson and me, assuming this were true, is the facility and resolution with which Dan’s ‘idea’ translated itself into an act. Hokan Edwardson ... is even worse than me, living a bourgeois [sic] lifestyle in almost all respects except his reading.”

“... When I spoke to Hokan Edwardson on the phone, he still sounded unusually distraught. If Dan had intended at all to make a permanent, life–long impression on Hokan Edwardson—to break through the barrier of mere philosophizing at last—then I think he might have succeeded. The rest of the family prefers—I suppose for obvious reasons—to interpret Dan’s later years and his suicide as symptoms of a mental disease....[Dan’s death] reminded me of the sometimes dismal gulfs which isolate human beings from one another. It reminded me just a tad of myself, having ideas and affections, but often feeling at a loss for the proper means to share them. More acutely, I felt somewhat guilty, as if I were being called to account for my unresponsiveness to similar claims made on me by others.”

Win Pettingell

Ted:[39]

when I visited my parents in 1978, my father described his employer, Win Pettingell, to me as a pathologically compulsive talker. Later I got to know Win Pettingell myself, and I found that he was rather talkative, but by no means abnormally so.

1978–1995

The Bombing Victims & Survivors

Diogenes J. Angelakos

The U.C. Berkeley professor survived an attack by the Unabomber but later died of prostate cancer.

Injured: In blast on July 2, 1982, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Synopsis: Angelakos, an electrical engineering professor, was injured when he grabbed a booby-trapped package left in a coffee room in Cory Hall. The blast mangled his right hand, but he avoided more serious injury when a gasoline can attached to the pipe bomb failed to explode. Following extensive surgery, he learned to write again, but powder burns served as a reminder of the bombing.

Disaster strikes twice: Also present at the May 15, 1985, blast at Berkeley. He tied a makeshift tourniquet around the arm of bombing victim John Hauser moments after the explosion.

On the Unabomber: “I would like to ask the guy ... if he believes in making changes for the good, why would he be hurting people? That’s the only thing I’d like to know,” Angelakos said after Kaczynski’s 1996 arrest.

Born: Chicago, 1919.

Died: In his Berkeley home on June 7, 1997, at the age of 77 after battling prostate cancer for more than six years.

Education: Received degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Harvard.

Career: Worked briefly at Notre Dame before he went to Berkeley in 1951, becoming director of the Electronics Research Laboratory in 1964. He retired as director in 1984, but continued to work with the lab until three weeks before his death.

Awards: Received the school’s highest award, the Berkeley Citation.

Accomplishments: Considered a pioneer in the field of microwaves, antennas and electromagnetic waves, as well as an advocate for students.

Impressions: “He was very much a people person, encouraging faculty and students to interact with one another,” Andrew Neureuther, whom Angelakos enticed to Berkeley as an electronic engineering professor in 1966, told The Associated Press after his death.

Family: His wife, Helen, died of cancer in 1982, and his son, Demetri, of sickle cell anemia and thalassemia in 1979. He is survived by a daughter, Erica Angelakos of Seattle.

Buckley Crist Jr.

The Northwestern University professor became the Unabomber’s first target when he received a package bomb in 1978.

Targeted: On May 26, 1978, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

Synopsis: A woman walking through a parking lot at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus found a package lying on the pavement. The parcel, which had $10 in uncanceled stamps pasted on it, was addressed to E.J. Smith, an electrical engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. The return address was that of Crist, a materials engineering professor at Northwestern’s Technological Institute.

The package was returned to Crist, who could not recall sending it. Neither did his secretary, so Crist called campus security. Northwestern police officer Terry Marker opened the parcel, which exploded and injured him slightly. Neither Crist nor Smith knew why they might be targeted.

Education: Earned bachelor’s from Williams College and Ph.D. from Duke University.

Present job: Professor of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering at Northwestern.

Reflections: “If you’ve been involved in something like this, you really want to know why,” Crist told the Chicago Tribune after Kaczynski’s 1996 arrest.

Dr. Charles Epstein

The world-renowned geneticist was injured when he opened a bomb mailed to his Bay Area

Injured: In blast on June 22, 1993, in Tiburon.

Synopsis: Epstein, a world-renowned geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, was injured when he opened a bomb in a padded brown envelope mailed to his home. He lost several fingers on his right hand, and suffered a broken arm and severe abdominal injuries. The blast blew out the windows of the house. The injuries required five hours of surgery. The return address on the package was that of James Hill, chairman of the chemistry department at California State University, Sacramento.

Early theory: Not sure initially if the blast was the work of the Unabomber, FBI investigators also questioned whether the bombings of Epstein and Yale professor David Gelernter could be the work of someone influenced by the hit movie, “Jurassic Park,” which portrayed in a negative light two genetics researchers, one from Yale and the other from San Francisco. The film characters helped develop a theme park featuring extinct dinosaurs brought to life through gene-cloning procedures.

Impressions: “Everyone seems to indicate Dr. Epstein is a fine, upstanding gentleman, well-regarded and well-liked not only by his neighbors but by his associates and employees at the hospital at the university,” John Covert, acting head of the FBI’s San Francisco office, said shortly after the bombing.

Career: Professor of pediatrics and chief of the division of medical genetics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Accomplishments: Editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics; located a gene that may contribute to Down’s syndrome; has won many awards for his research.

On the Unabomber: “For the longest time I couldn’t feel anything for him,” Epstein said after Kaczynski’s plea bargain. “I don’t feel anger per se. I looked at him in court, and I came to the decision this is a profoundly evil person. He is really the essence of evil.”

“The bottom line is,” he said, “he’s a coward. He himself, who was willing to sentence other people to death, was afraid to die himself. He wasn’t willing to die for his ideas. He was willing for me to die for them.”

On the Unabomber manifesto: Epstein wrote in a guest editorial for Genetic Engineering News that the Unabomber’s sentiments were not out of line with much that has been said or written by “less disturbed minds.” He added that if all of the criticisms about genetics and its potential applications were at the level of the Unabomber’s manifesto and similar types of writing, “I would be concerned but would not be deeply troubled.”

Related items:

• Two blasts end six years of silence (July 4, 1993)

• Two survivors piece lives back together (Nov. 9, 1997)

• Doctor maimed by bomb calls Kaczynski coward (Jan. 24, 1998)

Patrick C. Fischer

The Vanderbilt University professor may have crossed paths with Theodore Kaczynski at Harvard in the 1960s.

Targeted: On May 5, 1982, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Synopsis: Fischer, head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt, was giving a series of lectures in Puerto Rico when his secretary, Janet Smith, opened a parcel addressed to the professor.

The package, a wooden box containing a pipe bomb, bore a return address from an engineering professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was sent to Pennsylvania State University, where Fischer had taught prior to moving to Nashville, and forwarded to Vanderbilt. Smith suffered cuts to her chest, arms and hands.

Present job: Professor of computer science at Vanderbilt.

Education: Earned bachelor’s in mathematics at University of Michigan in 1957; master’s in actuarial science, University of Michigan, 1958; Ph.D. in mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1962.

Career: Held positions at Harvard, Cornell, the University of Waterloo and Penn State before becoming a Vanderbilt professor in 1980; also served as computer science chair at Vanderbilt for 15 years.

Experience: Founder of the ACM Special Interest Group for Algorithms and Computability Theory; also served on the Association for Computing Machinery; holds positions on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences, and Computer Languages.

Research: In theoretical computer science until 1972 and primarily in database theory since then.

Kaczynski connection: Both men studied mathematics in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1960s. Fischer, then a graduate student at MIT, took a course at Harvard in 1962, the same year Kaczynski got his math degree from the university.

“It’s conceivable that we took a course together but I don’t know for sure,” Fischer told the Chicago Tribune after Kaczynski’s 1996 arrest. “We could have overlapped as students. I don’t remember the name or the face.”

David Gelernter

The Yale University computer scientist was targeted twice by the Unabomber: once with a bomb; two years later with a taunting letter.

Injured: In blast on June 24, 1993, at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

Synopsis: A bomb injured Gelernter, a computer scientist, when he opened a package mailed to his office. The return address was that of Mary Jane Lee, a computer science professor at California State University, Sacramento. Gelernter suffered serious wounds to the abdomen and chest, and lost part of his right hand, vision in his left eye and the hearing in one ear.

Education: Earned bachelor’s at Yale in 1976; received Ph.D. from The State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982.

Career: Joined staff at Yale in 1982; now a professor of computer science.

Research interests: Parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence.

Achievements: Best known for developing, along with Yale’s Nicholas Carriero, a computer programming language called “Linda”; received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986.

Author: Of “Mirror Worlds” and “1939: The Lost World of the Fair,” a look at the 1939 World’s Fair and the passionate feelings it still evokes in those who were there; the autobiographical “Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber” was recently released. Also co-wrote several textbooks.

On the Unabomber: “I couldn’t care less what the man’s views on technology are or what message he intended to deliver; the message I got was that in any society, no matter how rich, just and free, you can rely on there being a certain number of evil cowards. I thank him for passing it along, but I knew that anyway.” — a reflection by Gelernter in Time magazine after Kaczynski’s arrest.

Other thoughts: “The bright side, so to speak, of grave injury, discomfort and nearness to death is that you emerge with a clear fix on what the heart treasures. Mostly I didn’t learn anything new but had the satisfaction of having my hunches confirmed. I emerged knowing that, as I had always suspected, the time I spend with my wife and boys is all that matters in the end.” — also from Time magazine, April 15, 1996.

Follow-up: In 1995, the Unabomber mailed a letter to Gelernter mocking him as a “techno-nerd” and jeering him for opening the explosive package two years before. The letter, mailed from Oakland on the same date as three other letters and a package bomb that killed timber lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray, criticized Gelernter for writing in his 1991 book, “Mirror Worlds,” that the advance of computerization was “inevitable.”

On Kaczynski: “I don’t think the guy is deranged,” he said during an interview on the “Today” show. “I haven’t seen a shred of evidence to suggest that he isn’t telling the truth when he tells us he’s absolutely sane, cogent, that he’s proud of being a cowardly terrorist killer.”

On the outcome: “We have a death penalty in this country to use in the case of vicious, terrorist killers,” he said. “I think if we don’t have it in us to use the death penalty in these cases, it’s a tragedy for the American people.”

Related items:

• Two blasts end six years of silence (July 4, 1993)

• Unabomber letter taunts professor hurt in ’93 blast (April 27, 1995)

• Text of Unabomber’s letter to Gelernter

• Survivor wants death penalty if ‘Hut Man’ guilty (Sept. 20, 1997)

• Two survivors piece lives back together (Nov. 9, 1997)

John G. Harris

The force of a 1979 blast at Northwestern University blew the eyeglasses from the graduate researcher’s face.

Injured: In blast on May 9, 1979, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Synopsis: A disguised explosive device left in a common area in the university’s Technological Institute slightly injured Harris when he attempted to open the cigar box and it exploded. The graduate researcher suffered cuts on his arms and burns around his eyes.

The force of the blast blew his eyeglasses off his face and singed his eyebrows and lashes. Harris and several other graduate students had been researching ground motion of strong earthquakes at the time.

Reflections: “From my perspective, it was a random event, nothing different than being hit by a car,” Harris told the Evanston Review in 1996. “I think the big impact has been all the interest from the press.”

Born: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Education: Earned bachelor’s in electrical engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; master’s in applied physics from Stanford University; and Ph.D. in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1979.

Present job: Professor of theoretical and applied mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

John E. Hauser

The U.C. Berkeley engineering student lost his dream of becoming an astronaut when he opened a bomb left in a campus computer lab.

Injured: In blast on May 15, 1985, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Synopsis: Hauser, an Air Force pilot, engineering student and aspiring astronaut, was severely injured when a bomb left in a computer room in Cory Hall exploded. He lost partial vision in his left eye and four fingers from his right hand, and major nerves in his forearm were severed. The force of the blast pitched his Air Force Academy ring into a wall so hard its lettering left a legible impression.

Professor Diogenes Angelakos, a previous victim of the Unabomber, happened to be across the hall at the time of the bombing. Angelakos made a tourniquet for Hauser’s arm out of a colleague’s tie.

Before the blast, Hauser had not been to the computer lab in weeks. He noticed a three-ring binder attached to a small box by a rubber band sitting on a table. He checked the items for identification to make sure a friend had not left them behind, an act which set off the bomb.

An element of luck: “I was standing at the table and there was a chair between me and the bomb. I think that caught a lot of the blast. It could easily have killed me, given the force of the explosion,” Hauser said months after the bombing.

Education: Earned bachelor’s at the U.S. Air Force Academy, master’s and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.

Present job: Engineering professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

On capital punishment: “I don’t have a functional right hand any longer,” Hauser said after learning that the death penalty would be sought for Kaczynski. “I have constant pain. But what good would it do to seek revenge or to be bitter? If someone said I had to make a decision today, I would come in against the death penalty, but I believe in the system, in which we consider all the facts before we come to some kind of decision.”

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “It could have been a very long and drawn-out ordeal. And I think the result might not have been so different with a jury of citizens,” Hauser said.

Related items:

• Serial bomber’s bloody trail has few clues (Dec. 25, 1985)

James V. McConnell

The University of Michigan psychology professor was targeted by the Unabomber in 1985.

Targeted: On Nov. 15, 1985, in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Synopsis: A bomb disguised as a manuscript sent to the home of McConnell, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, exploded when his research assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened it. The parcel spewed lead fishing sinkers causing shrapnel wounds and powder burns on Suino’s chest and arms. McConnell, who was about eight feet from the blast, suffered hearing loss.

Born: Oct. 26, 1925, in Okmulgee, Okla.

Died: April 9, 1990, of a heart attack.

Education: Earned bachelor’s in psychology from Louisiana State University in 1947; served in U.S. Naval Reserve 1944–46; received master’s and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Early work: Worked as a disc jockey and waiter while attending LSU.

Professional career: Started work in the psychology department at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1956; promoted to full professor in 1963; retired two years before his death.

Honors: Awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award by the American Psychological Foundation in 1976.

Reflections: “I would like to spend half an hour with him in a dark alley,” Suino said of the bomber in 1995.

“To me, what this man is doing is every bit as abhorrent as the bombing in Oklahoma City,” he added. “There is simply no justification for taking lives based on your personal views.”

Possible connection: Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski attended graduate school at the University of Michigan.

Follow-up: Suino sued Kaczynski in August 1996 seeking at least $10,000 in damages for burns, hearing loss and emotional anguish resulting from the bombing.

Thomas J. Mosser

The New Jersey ad executive was killed because his public relations firm had represented a company responsible for an oil spill.

Killed: In blast on Dec. 10, 1994, in North Caldwell, N.J. He was 50.

Synopsis: A package bomb mailed to the home of Mosser, a New York City advertising executive, exploded when he opened it in the kitchen of his suburban New Jersey home. The package carried a San Francisco postmark and return address and was similar in size to two videocassettes stacked together.

The blast, at about 11 a.m., nearly decapitated Mosser, dressed at the time in his bathrobe, and carved a two-foot-wide crater in the kitchen counter. He had planned to take his wife and children Christmas tree shopping that day.

Motive: Letter written later by the Unabomber claimed Mosser was a target because he had worked for a public relations firm which had represented Exxon. In 1989, an Exxon tanker spilled oil in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Early work: Mosser was a former journalist and had served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.

Career: Worked 25 years for Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm; promoted to general manager and executive vice president of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest advertising firms, shortly before his death.

Impressions: “If you were a friend of Tom’s, you were a friend for life,” close friend and colleague James Dowling told Time magazine shortly after Mosser’s death.

Family: Mosser’s wife, Susan, and daughters Kim, then 13, and Kelly, then 15 months, were home at the time of the explosion but were not injured. He also had another daughter and a son.

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “Nothing will bring closure. Nothing will end the pain,” Susan Mosser said in an interview with the The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger.

Related items:

• Serial bomber killed ad exec (Dec. 12, 1994)

Gilbert B. Murray

The Sacramento timber lobbyist was killed when he opened a package addressed to his predecessor.

Killed: In blast on April 24, 1995, in Sacramento. He was 47.

Synopsis: A bomb mailed to the lobbying offices of the private California Forestry Association exploded when it was opened by Murray, the association’s president. The package was addressed to Bill Dennison, the predecessor who retired in April 1994 after having handpicked Murray as his replacement.

The office receptionist typically opens the mail but gave the package to Murray because it was too difficult for her to unwrap. The force of the explosion was so great that it pushed the nails partly out of the walls in other offices located in the same building.

A pregnant assistant who had brought Murray the scissors used to open the package had just left his office and was heading down to the hallway to her own office when the explosion occurred. The return address was Closet Dimensions, a custom furniture company in Oakland. The explosion occurred just five days after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Education: Forestry degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career: Survived two tours in Vietnam. Worked for Collins Pine Co. in Chester, Calif., as a summer student before landing a full-time job there as a professional forester. In 1982, he was named chief forester of the company. Left in 1987 to join the California Forestry Association staff as vice president for private timber. He became president in 1994.

Impressions: “He was a soft-spoken cordial person, always looking for common ground on issues,” Mark Pawlicki, a business associate, said of Murray shortly after his death.

“My father was the greatest man I ever met,” Murray’s son, Wilson, said at his father’s funeral. “He loved my mom, my brother and me more than life itself. He was always there for us. We always came first ... I can only hope I can be half the man he was.”

Tributes: Friends and colleagues from the timber industry placed a sandstone boulder with a bronze plaque at the edge of a meadow near Chester. Murray’s sister, Barbara, staged a 10-day fast after her brother’s death to help her contain her rage. Veteran postal inspector Tony Muljat, a long-time member of the Unabom task force, chose April 24, 1996 — the one-year anniversary of Murray’s slaying — as his retirement as a tribute to the slain timber lobbyist.

Family: Lived in Roseville with his wife, Connie; and sons Wil and Gilbert, who were 18 and 16 when their father died.

Follow-up: Just hours before the one-year anniversary of Murray’s death, his widow and son, Wil, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Theodore Kaczynski. The suit included unnamed and an unspecified number of other defendants listed only as “Does.” The Murrays filed the suit themselves without a lawyer.

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “While his killer’s life continues, my husband and the father of my sons is gone forever,” Murray’s widow, Connie, said.

Related items:

• Unabomber kills again, timber lobbyist slain in capital (April 25, 1995)

• Victim called caring, kind (April 25, 1995)

• Quirk in routine brought bomb, lobbyist together (April 25, 1995)

• 400 bid farewell to bomb victim (April 29, 1995)

• Unabom victim’s wife opens window on loss Nov. 8, 1997)

• Gilbert Murray touched many in life, death (Nov. 9, 1997)

• ‘I don’t think justice can ever be served’ (Jan. 25, 1998)

Hugh Campbell Scrutton

The Sacramento merchant had traveled the world but died just outside his computer rental store.

Killed: In blast on Dec. 11, 1985, in Sacramento. He was 38.

Synopsis: Scrutton left his computer rental store at Century Plaza shopping center for lunch at about noon, when he stopped to pick up what he apparently thought to be litter. The bomb exploded, sending shrapnel as far as 150 feet. Scrutton took the full force of the blast in his chest. Metal shrapnel penetrated his heart and tore off his right hand.

Born: Sept. 13, 1947, in Sacramento.

Education: Graduated from the University of California, Davis. Traveled through Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan and India.

Career: Owner of RenTech Computer Rentals in Sacramento.

Impressions: Old UC Davis roommate and friend John Lawyer described Scrutton in 1996 as someone who lived for new experiences. An inheritance allowed him to travel and devote time to crafting pottery. And given more time, he also would have been a successful businessman, he said.

“What I’ve thought a thousand times is Hugh was a guy who traveled all over the world,” Lawyer reflected. “And he gets killed in his own back yard.”

Possible connection: May have studied math at U.C. Berkeley while Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski taught there, though Scrutton did not attend Kacynski’s classes.

Capital punishment: “I’ve been waiting for this,” said Bessie Dudley, Scrutton’s mother, after the announcement that the death penalty would be sought for Theodore Kaczynski. “He took my son from me. The sad part is that he didn’t even know him. He didn’t know any of these people, and he didn’t think about them at all.”

A change of heart: “As long as he will be put in prison and never get out, what’s the difference? I’m very accepting of what happened because you can’t change it ... So why be angry?” Bessie Dudley said in an interview with KCRA news after Kaczynski’s plea bargain.

Related items:

• Mystery blast kills capital merchant (Dec. 12, 1985)

• Sacramento case linked to 10 others (Dec. 20, 1985)

• Friend wonders ‘Why Hugh?’ (April 6, 1996)

• Hugh Scrutton led life full of joy, adventure (Nov. 9, 1997)

Percy A. Wood

The president of United Airlines was injured when he opened a bomb that was mailed to his home disguised as a book.

Injured: In blast on June 10, 1980, in Lake Forest, Ill.

Synopsis: Wood, president of United Airlines, suffered injuries to his hands, face and thighs when he opened a bomb disguised as a book. The package, postmarked Chicago, was mailed to his home. Weeks before, he had received a letter telling him that he would be receiving a book that all business executives should read. The book: “Ice Brothers,” by Sloan Wilson.

Wood spent several weeks in a hospital and underwent plastic surgery to regain the use of his hand.

Career: Joined United in 1941; named president of the airline in 1978, taking over the post from Richard J. Ferris, who was named chairman of the board. Retired in 1983 and moved to Florida.

Reflections: “I’ve thought about it a lot, but I still don’t know why it happened,” Wood told the Chicago Tribune after Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996. “I’ve never heard the guy’s name. I never saw him before.”

Possible connection: Wood was on the Bay Area Pollution Control Advisory Board when Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski taught at U.C. Berkeley.

Family: Wood’s wife was vacationing in California at the time of the blast. The couple’s children were grown and no longer living at home.

Related items:

• Package bomb injures United Airlines chief (June 11, 1980)

• Letter, package bomb had same address, police say (June 12, 1980)

Gary Wright

A blast that slightly injured the computer repairman also provided investigators with their first description of the Unabomber.

Injured: In blast on Feb. 20, 1987, at CAAM’s Inc., Salt Lake City.

Synopsis: A bomb inside a couple of nail-studded boards in a canvas bag and disguised as a road hazard exploded in the parking lot of a computer sales and service company, maiming Wright, the store’s co-owner.

The blast yielded the first major break in the Unabom case. A secretary who had been looking out a window at the parking lot told investigators that she had seen a slight man wearing sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt place the bag on the ground moments before the explosion.

The Investigation

Janet Reno – U.S. Attorney General

The U.S. attorney general made the call to pursue the death penalty against Kaczynski.

Born: July 21, 1938, in Miami.

Education: A debating champion at Coral Gables High School in Dade County, Fla. Studied chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Earned her law degree at Harvard in 1963 as one of 16 women in a class of more than 500 students.

Early career: At Cornell, earned room and board as a waitress and dorm supervisor.

Professional career: Won five elections by large margins for state attorney in Dade County; during her 15 years as Miami’s chief prosecutor, managed a law office of some 900 people and an annual budget of $30 million. Her office prosecuted cases involving homicide, child abuse, rape and other violent crimes, drug trafficking and white-collar crimes. Her office won 80 capital punishment convictions for first-degree murderers under her tenure.

Nominated: For U.S. attorney general by President Clinton on Feb. 11, 1993. Sworn in on March 12, 1993, ending an embarassing search by Clinton, who looked first to corporate attorney Zoe Baird and federal Judge Kimba Wood; both were tripped up because they had employed undocumented immigrants.

Milestones: The first woman attorney general of the United States. Had a more extensive criminal law background than any attorney general in the previous two decades. Decided to pursue the death penalty against Kaczynski.

Impressions: The 6-foot, 2-inch Reno has been described as “a tough, tough lady ... an adversary of steel.”

Family: Unmarried, no children. Has three younger siblings. Her father, Henry Reno, came to the United States from Denmark; he was a police reporter for the Miami HeraId who died in 1967. Her mother, Jane Wood Reno, became an investigative reporter for the Miami News after her husband’s death; she died in 1992.

Related items:

• Miami prosecutor picked for attorney general (Feb. 12, 1993)

• Attorney general choice wins Senate panel’s unanimous OK (March 11, 1993)

• Prosecutors urge Reno to seek death for Kaczynski (May 15, 1997)

• Reno will pursue Kaczynski death (May 16, 1997)

1990s

Political Theorists

John Zerzan

Website: John Zerzan.net

Contact: Jzprimitivo@gmail.com

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letter Correspondence with John Zerzan

• Burn Wild

• John Zerzan.net

- [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-conversation-with-john-zerzan-on-direct-action-school-shootings-authenticity-veganism-more][A Conversation with John Zerzan on Direct Action, School Shootings, Authenticity, Veganism & More

The Ted K Archive]]

Zerzan: “The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account?... Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life?”

“They ain’t innocent. Which isn’t to say that I’m totally at ease with blowing them into pieces. Part of me is. And part of me isn’t.”

“I think the targets were relatively more appropriate as he went along, as they became more lethal, on that level anyway, I think you could argue that that’s the case.”

“I ended the speech with the suggestion that there might be a parallel between Kaczynski and John Brown. Brown made an anti-slavery attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. Like Kaczynski, Brown was considered deranged, but he was tried and hung. Not long afterward he became a kind of American saint of the abolitionist movement. I offered the hope, if not the prediction, that T.K. might at some point also be considered in a more positive light for his resistance to industrial civilization.”

“Bonanno, it should be added, has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his courageous resistance over the years.” Bonanno was imprisoned for armed robbery and promotes the strategy of kneecapping journalists.

Ishkah: And what would be the measurements of success for you do you think?

Zerzan: Well, I would say advancing the dialogue. I think that if your thing is mainly critique, it’s a question of the conversation in society, is there some resonance? Is there some interest? Is there some development going on there? In other words, I’m not afraid of certain tactics that people commonly shrink from. and they say well, ‘you’re just turning everybody off’, but sometimes I think you have to go through that stage if you will, I mean sometimes that comes with the territory, in other words, people will be defensive and horrified or whatever at first and then they won’t be. You know? Then it becomes part of the dialogue, you know then things change, they don’t remain the same. In other words, there can be shock at the beginning with some tactics, but that wears off, I think, I would assert that’s likely to be the case.

Zerzan: Well, I wanted to just kick off a few comments. And not quite chosen at random, but I want to say that. I don’t want this to be taken as some big overview that I’m absolutely wedded to. I’m talking about a new book. A small book called “the collected communiques of individualists tending toward the wild”. And this was published by “War on society” with an introduction by someone called “plain words”. This is in Spanish, this is from Mexico.

Individual laudes teniendo alo salvay. Let’s just call it ITS for short and again that’s Individuals Tending toward the Wild, or it could be translated as Individualists Tending toward the Wild. I tend to think that’s a little less confusing because individualist. As a member of historical political. At least may or may not apply.

So, what we have here is 100 and 10 pages, and these people truly are the eirs of Ted Kaczynski. They have sent bombs to various high tech people. With the special focus, it seems like on nanotech people, they killed a nanotech chief engineer about a year ago. So this is pretty heavy stuff and this is rare material this stuff. I think it really should be debated. And I do think back to the Unabomber days, when that was especially in 1995 just before Ted Kaczynski was captured. There was quite a widespread public discussion, fairly widespread. Not enormous, but and I’m hoping that this might kick that off again. And I don’t suppose that as the earlier case, there is any real way to separate the ideas from the violence? That’s the whole question itself. But I think that these folks clearly are vehemently anti technology and I just want to mention just a couple of things here. Maybe for further discussion I’m going to read something from. The very first communique, which was only last April April 2011, and they’re talking about some of their some of their actions and what they have in mind. With this action we conducted, we have not struck powerfully at the mega machine and we are aware that with this we have not changed anything. Maybe the state or federal police now protect the university community. Maybe Nanotechnologists will realize that we see them as enemies. Perhaps the state of Mexico will begin more in depth investigations, but nothing more. And we say this because we know that all the efforts we make against the techno industrial system are useless. We have seen the immensity of this great massive metal and concrete, and we realize that all we ever do at one time or another will not stop progress and less so if there are still false radicals and left to struggles that. Name at the destruction of a target but have not yet noticed, nor have not viewed beyond that. All this does not do anything. Some may think that this pessimistic that we have fallen into defeatism, but no, if we had fallen into these traps of civilization would not be making explosives for technology staff. We say this rather because it is the reality and we know that reality hurts. What is needed is. To hit hard. From within a Unabomber list ideat the system that’s a question to put nanobiotechnology telecommunication industry. Electricity, computers, oil in our city. And if we strike them unanimously with others in different countries, all that what would happen? Would we deter anything? Civilization is collapsing and a new world will be born through the efforts of anti civilization warriors. Please let us see the truth plant our feet on the ground and let leftism and illusions fly from our minds, the revolution. And never existed, nor have revolutionaries. Those those who view themselves as potential revolutionaries and seek a radical anti technology shift are truly being idealistic and irrational because none of that exists in this dying world. Only individual autonomy, capitalized exists and it is for this that we fight and all though. All this useless and futile. We prefer to be defeated in war against total domination than to remainert, passive waiting or as part of all this. We prefer to position ourselves on the side of wild faunand flora that remain. We prefer to return to nature, respect her absolutely and abandon the cities to maintain our claim as anti civilization warriors. We prefer to continue the war that we have declared years ago, knowing that we will lose, but promising ourselves that we will give our greatest. OK, now that is a mouthful and I just. I just seem to see that there’s really a lot of despair around, and then it could hardly be a great. Shock, but to absolutely rule out any change. It really strikes me as then you have this sort of private existential of. Sort of thing. Which I applaud, by the way, I have for. Well, we need to sort that out a little. Bit as well. But knowing that we will lose. I mean, you don’t know that if you but you’re making it so by declaring that you are contributing to that. And by the way I was talking to my friend about a friend of mine about this the other evening. And she said that. Part of the problem may be. In, in terms of well in terms of even criticizing these texts and this whole approach, that winning or losing is somehow a false choice or a false formulation. To even talk about winning or losing, but,, I’m confused by that as well. I have to admit, because I know what I mean by winning or losing. Losing is the continued existence of this suicidal. This whole ruin is dominant order and which gets more negative and unhealthy. And crazy all the time, and winning would obviously be putting it into. And I haven’t given up on seeing an end to it. I think it’s. Not as all powerful as some of these people seem to think, and you that you throw in the towel before you even started. I’m maybe. I need to. I’d like to hear more from other people about this and maybe for one thing simply to grok if it’s absolutely hopeless then. You’re you’re killing people and risking your freedom in your life for what? I don’t really quite get that. And also I would say that there’s something really ultra rationalist about this that I’m just put off a little bit by again though, I. You know, for a long time now I’ve been pretty vehemently anti tech myself. And when? A lot of people ran for cover during the Unabomber days before he was captured. Did not want to discuss the ideas. Did not even want to discuss the ideas out of fear there were there were not so many people who did so. I think there’s this implication that you are somehow leftist or civilized if you don’t accept that we’re simply screwed. Full stop, period. No, I don’t accept that, and I’m not a leftist. Anyway, there’s something they even use. They even capitalize the word reason at times which.

Zerzan: Yeah, ITS, they’ve… This not so well known up here. I’ve mentioned it somewhat on the show here before. They killed a nanotechnology engineer in Mexico as one of the leading lights of the nanotech stuff down there in Monterrey. He was driving and they plugged him. They offed him there. They’re very much a quote Unabomber type group, in fact they’re. It reads word for word with that point of view, and which in general, I totally agree with, but this, I think this... Somebody mentioned that when they’re reading these things from the ITS and its critique of civilization, I forget exactly how this worded, and maybe I’m pushing this a little too far, but… They’re anti-civ, but aren’t they exhibiting some of the worst civilizational attitudes? Don’t know I’m… That doesn’t really grab me very much, except in a negative way.

ADAM LANZA: Hi, good. Um. I’m a fan of your writing.

ZERZAN: Thank you.

Kevin Tucker

Kevin Tucker’s Twitter

• Ted Kaczynski’s Interview with a Turkish Primitivist

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letter Correspondence With Kevin Tucker

• The Message and the Messenger

Derrick Jenson

• Derrick Jensen Letters

Earth First! — Theresa Kintz, etc.

3 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Do or Die Magazine

Live Wild or Die Zine — Jack Wild, etc.

Green Anarchist Magazine — Steve Booth, Richard Hering, etc.

Biographers & Publishers

Beau Friedlander

4 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Tried to publish Ted’s book Truth Versus Lies, he might even still have the ready to print book file saved, plus his correspondence and open to coming to a deal with Ted’s copyright heir Susan Gale to publish. Beau tweets about how Ted predicted a “call for unity among the far right. He said it was the unavoidable outcome of technology used in aid of ideology and hyper-socialization.”

Michael Mello

4 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Alston Chase

3 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Gary Greenberg

2 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

A mental health professional that Ted wrote to sometimes 3 times a week over two years. Ted offered him an interview after reading a forward he wrote to Michael Mello’s book on his court case, questioning the schizophrenia diagnosis. And Gary wrote an essay recently on Ted’s legacy called Unabomber Dreams for The Point Magazine.

Archivists

Julie Herrada

Website: Joseph A. Labadie Collection

Contact: jherrada@umich.edu

In February 1997, nearly a year after he was arrested, I wrote Kaczynski’s attorney, Judy Clarke. It is always a little tricky writing to potential donors. Without knowing exactly what existed and what was available, I asked for everything, including manuscripts, journals, correspondence, photographs, and legal papers. Four months passed and one day I was surprised by a phone call from Clarke, stating, “Mr. Kaczynski is very interested.” Clarke had shown a copy of my letter to Kaczynski. He said he would like more information about our library. It was apparent that, even though he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan (and won the Sumner-Myers Award in 1967 for outstanding graduate thesis), he had never heard of the Labadie Collection, which is not unusual, especially for someone not studying in the social sciences.

Main Trial

Garland Ellis Burrell Jr. – U.S. District Judge

The federal judge is considered fair and without ego but lacking in criminal trial experience. The Unabomber trial was his first capital case.

Role: Presiding judge, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: July 4, 1947, in south central Los Angeles.

Early career: Started work at age 10, cleaning out back yards. Later jobs included stints as a newspaper carrier, janitor, brick tender and Chicken Delight deliveryman. Also worked off and on for a number of years as a cashier at the Mayfair market in Inglewood, eventually becoming the store’s assistant manager.

Education: Spent a semester at East Los Angeles Junior College before entering the U.S. Marine Corps. After his discharge, attended the University of Nevada, Reno, before transferring to California State University, Los Angeles, where he received a sociology degree in June 1972.

Early inspiration: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” After reading the angry account of the black-nationalist leader’s life, Burrell, a former high school high-hurdles champion, shifted his focus from athletics to academics.

Graduate studies: Has two graduate degrees — one in social work from Washington University in St. Louis, the other from California Western School of Law in San Diego. Passed the California Bar exam in the fall of 1976.

Professional career: Worked as a researcher, then a prosecutor in the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office; spent nine months in private practice; was a senior deputy Sacramento city attorney; headed the civil division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento.

On the bench: Confirmed in 1992 by the U.S. Senate as a federal judge in the Sacramento-based Eastern District of California, which stretches from Bakersfield to the Oregon state line. His lifetime appointment, made in 1991 by then-President George Bush, came at the recommendation of Gov. Pete Wilson, then a U.S. senator. He is the first African American federal judge in the 34-county district.

Dislikes: Surprises in the courtroom. “He is very open with attorneys, and he has a short fuse if you don’t give it back in kind,” criminal defense lawyer Robert Holley has said of Burrell.

Viewed as: Fair, deliberate and without ego. The biggest marks against him appear to be that he is slow and has little criminal trial exposure.

Milestones: Theodore Kaczynski’s trial was Burrell’s first capital case and the first death-penalty case in the Eastern District’s history. Burrell got the assignment after at least two other Sacramento federal judges recused themselves.

Notable cases: In 1992, declined to rule on whether or not accused mass murderer Charles Ng should be confined to a steel cage during court recesses, saying a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling precluded his intervention. Later that year, ruled against Gov. Wilson’s use of IOUs to pay state workers during the 1992 budget stalemate; later settled the case. Postponed the sentencing of Jason Judd, an Orangevale man who pleaded guilty to hate crimes against two African American families, because the prosecutor had not convinced Burrell of Judd’s leadership in the campaign of bigotry; held an evidentiary hearing and later gave Judd a maximum 21-month sentence.

Family: Married Karen Kerchner in June 1972. The couple has a daughter and three sons. Burrell has described his marriage as “the best decision I’ve made.”

Related items:

• From ghetto to U.S. judge (March 17, 1992)

• Unabomber judge called fair, exact (June 23, 1996)

— Defence Team —

Quin Denvir

The federal public defender has secured reversal of three guilty verdicts in death penalty cases.

Role: Lead defense attorney, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: In 1940 on Chicago’s South Side, an Irish-Catholic kid whose father was a personal injury attorney and a Mayor Richard Daly precinct captain.

Education: Graduated from University of Notre Dame; spent four years in U.S. Navy. Earned master’s in economics at American University. Graduated with honors from University of Chicago School of Law.

Early career: Worked at Covington & Burling, a highly regarded law firm in Washington, D.C., until 1971, when he joined California Rural Legal Assistance, a publicly financed agency that represents the poor in civil matters. “I had worked for big, corporate clients and felt there were a lot of people who couldn’t afford me,” he later said of the decision. Spent a year as a public defender in Monterey County; worked as California state public defender from 1978 to 1984 and then in private practice until 1996.

Present job: Took over the Sacramento defender’s office in June 1996. His four-year appointment, made by the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, put him in charge of a law office of more than 20 attorneys and some 30 support personnel, as well as an annual budget of $5.5 million.

Notable cases: Represented former state schools chief William Honig in the appeal of his conviction of awarding state contracts to programs run by his wife. Defended Michelle “Batgirl” Cummiskey, a young prostitute convicted of the brutal slaying of a Sacramento man; she faced the death penalty but received a 26-year sentence.

Capital expertise: In August 1997, helped halt the scheduled execution of Thomas Thompson only minutes after the convicted rapist-murderer said his final goodbyes to his family; has argued before the California Supreme Court more than 25 times, securing reversal of three guilty verdicts in death penalty cases.

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “This case has reached the only just resolution,” Denvir and co-counsel Judy Clarke said.

Impressions: “I consider him to be one of the best lawyers, most ethical lawyers I ever worked with,” Cruz Reynoso, a former justice of the California Supreme Court, said of Denvir in 1996. “A real craftsman, a person of great sense of justice.”

Apparel: Often wears polos, jeans and running shoes in the courthouse; a suit and his trademark boots in the courtroom. The boots are “good for kicking ass,” he’s joked.

Sidenote: An avid hiker and biker.

Family: Married to Ann Gallagher more than 30 years. The couple has a son and daughter. His two brothers also became lawyers; one now teaches law at the University of San Francisco and the other is a judge in Colorado.

Related items:

• ‘One of the best’ to head defense team (June 16, 1996)

Judy Clarke

The defense attorney helped convince a South Carolina jury in 1995 that Susan Smith didn’t deserve to die for killing her two young sons.

Role: Defense attorney, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: 1953.

Grew up: In Asheville, N.C., where she dreamt of becoming Perry Mason or the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Education: Received bachelor’s in psychology from Furman University in Greenville, S.C., in 1974; awarded law degree in 1977 from the University of South Carolina Law Center. Member of the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Ga.; has sat on its Board of Regents since 1985.

Professional career: Started out as a trial attorney for Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc., later becoming its executive director. Joined private law firm in 1991; left a year later to start a new federal defender program in Spokane, Wash. Also a widely published author of legal articles and co-author of the Federal Sentencing Manual, the benchmark treatise on the federal sentencing guidelines system.

Notable cases: Helped convince jurors that Susan Smith didn’t deserve to die for killing her two young sons in South Carolina in 1995. Clarke donated her nearly $83,000 fee from the case to South Carolina’s Post Conviction Defender Organization, an agency that defends the poor against criminal charges. Her co-counsel, David Bruck, has called her “a one-woman Dream Team.”

Present job: Executive director of Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho.

The Unabomber case: Appointed co-counsel for Theodore Kaczynski in July 1996.

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “This case has reached the only just resolution,” Clarke and co-counsel Quin Denvir said.

Milestones: First public defender and second woman elected president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers for 1996–97.

Impressions: “She is the patron saint of defense lawyers,” former NACDL head Gerald Goldstein told The Recorder, an affiliate of Court TV, in 1996. “(Her specialty) is impossible tasks that require untold amounts of labor and imagination. There is not anybody I’d rather have at my back in my courtroom.”

From Clarke’s statement on separate trials for Oklahoma City bombing suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols: “At a time when Congress and the presidential contenders appear willing to do or say anything to seem ‘tough on crime,’ Judge Matsch’s ruling should be commended by all Americans who believe in the United States Constitution. The Constitution says both of these men are innocent until proven guilty, and each of them is to be judged separately and fairly. That way all, including the victims and survivors of the bombing, can be more certain of the ultimate outcome.”

Married: More than 20 years to Speedy Rice, an attorney and teacher at Gonzaga University in Spokane. The couple has a giant schnauzer, Abe, named after the late Abe Fortas, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice who, as a trial attorney, won a 1963 high court decision guaranteeing legal counsel to poor people.

Related items:

• Susan Smith’s lawyer may join Kaczynski defense team (July 16, 1996)

Kevin Clymo

The criminal defense attorney was appointed to handle the issue of Kaczynski’s competency.

Role: Appointed to handle the issue of Kaczynski’s competence to stand trial.

Born: In San Francisco in 1948.

Education: Earned psychology degree from Stanford University; graduated from Sacramento’s McGeorge School of Law in 1979.

Career: Clymo, who served in Vietnam, headed to law school after he grew bored with his job as a truck driver. After graduation, he became an assistant public defender for Sacramento County. He left that office in 1990 and has been in private practice since.

Notable cases: Clymo represented Dorothea Puente, an ex-convict who ran a downtown Sacramento boardinghouse where seven corpses were unearthed in November 1988. Puente was found guilty of murdering three of the buried tenants and sentenced to life without parole.

Clymo also defended Angela Dawn Shannon, who was found guilty of mailing a letter to a Wisconsin doctor threatening to “hunt you down like any other wild beast and kill you” if he did not stop performing abortions. Shannon, the daughter of ultra-radical Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, was sentenced to almost four years in prison.

The Unabomber case: Judge Garland Burrell Jr. summoned Clymo to mediate a dispute between Kaczynski and his attorneys over their plans to use a mental defect defense. He then appointed Clymo to help present the defendant’s position in the discussion of his competency to stand trial.

On Kaczynski’s plea bargain: “All’s well that ends well. I’m glad it’s over,” Kevin Clymo said.

Impressions: “He (has) an easy, unpretentious, down-to-earth manner, and a loose-jointed way of moving which led his foes in the (district attorney’s) office to unkindly dub him ‘the man made entirely of spare body parts,’” Carla Norton wrote in “Disturbed Ground,” her book on the Puente case.

Related items:

• New attorney for Kaczynski a trial veteran (Jan. 9, 1998)

— Defence Investigators —

Betsy Anderson

Worked for Ted’s first lawyer, Michael J. Donahge at Federal Defenders of Montana. P.O. Box 250, Helena MT 5924–0250. Later helped out as an investigator.

Scharlette Holdman

Dr. Scharlette Holdman (December 11, 1946 – July 12, 2017) was an American death penalty abolitionist, anthropologist, and civil rights activist. She earned the nickname “The Angel of Death Row” due to her work collaborating with attorneys representing death row inmates during the appeals process and defendants facing capital murder charges, especially in Florida in the 1980s. She also earned the nickname “The Mistress of Delay” for the impact her advocacy had on delaying the execution of death row inmates’ sentences. Holdman called herself a “death penalty mitigation specialist” and also coined the term “mitigation specialist” to refer to people to whom defense attorneys would refer to gather information on a capital defendant’s past.

While Holdman was not an attorney herself, she counseled and guided attorneys, providing strategies for those attorneys to prevent their clients from receiving death sentences. Holdman’s strategies involved mentoring attorneys on how to provide juries with holistic views of capital defendants’ backgrounds. Holdman’s work was considered highly influential to the American Bar Association’s guidelines on defending capital defendants; Robert Dunham, former executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called Holdman’s work the “model for life-history investigations” and stated that it set the “standard” that the American Bar Association continues to follow in death penalty cases. Holdman’s efforts have been credited for the decline in the imposition of death sentences in the United States in the 2010s. One defense attorney who worked with Holdman stated, “Scharlette’s influence is so broad that anybody who is doing mitigation is informed by her, even if they’ve never heard of her. All roads lead back to her.”

Holdman was involved in numerous high-profile death penalty cases, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph; Jared Lee Loughner, a mass murderer and attempted assassin of Gabby Giffords; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a member of Al-Qaeda who helped orchestrate the September 11 attacks. In 1995, journalist and author David Von Drehle profiled Holdman and her work in his overview and critique of Florida’s death penalty in the 1980s, Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Capital Punishment.

Early life, personal life, and education Holdman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on December 11, 1946, to Neil Holdman and Maggie Mae Wardlow. Holdman and one of her sisters described their parents as racist towards black people, although Holdman did not adopt the same prejudices; in an interview with the Miami Herald, she stated that her parents disapproved of her civil rights and anti-death penalty work and that she was estranged from them. Holdman grew up in Memphis and graduated from high school in 1964. Afterwards, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology at the University of Memphis, her Master of Arts in the same field at the University of Oregon, and her Doctor of Philosophy, again in anthropology, at the University of Hawaiʻi.

In the 1960s, Holdman became involved in the civil rights movement, working to help register black people to vote in the South. One of Holdman’s first occupations was with a group opposing the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1970s, while she lived in Hawaii, she ran several American Civil Liberties Union chapters, primarily advocating for the rights of the physically handicapped, the decriminalization of sex work, prison abolition, abortion rights, and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. She also worked as an ACLU director in New Orleans and worked to close several jails, although she did not enjoy that work. She ultimately moved to Miami, Florida, in 1977, where she briefly worked as the ACLU executive director of Florida before resigning and relocating to Tallahassee, Florida.

Holdman was married at least once, to James Shotwell Lindzey, although they divorced in 1974. Holdman later stated that she found marriage stifling. They had at least two children.

Anti-death penalty advocacy in Florida Holdman focused on advocating against the death penalty after the Gregg v. Georgia decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 paved the way for use of the death penalty to resume in the United States. The Gregg decision required courts to consider “compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind,” so Holdman decided to recruit and mentor capital defense attorneys in presenting mitigating factors about capital defendants’ backgrounds to juries and appellate courts, including information regarding inmates’ family histories, mental capacity, motives, and medical history. Holdman used her anthropology background to aid in conducting multigenerational studies on defendants’ and death row inmates’ backgrounds and families. Robert Dunham, who was the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, explained the impact of Holdman’s work by stating, “Juries want to kill monsters. They have a very hard time giving the go-ahead to kill somebody they see as a vulnerable human being.”

Around 1978, Holdman started and headed the Tallahassee-based Florida Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, an organization that recruited volunteer attorneys to work on capital defendants’ cases and death row inmates’ appeals. The Florida Clearinghouse had an annual budget under $25,000, and Holdman’s salary was $600 a month; during her time at the clearinghouse, she lived a frugal lifestyle. Holdman typically recruited lawyers and sent them to Craig Barnard, the chief assistant public defender of West Palm Beach, Florida, for training and education on how to craft an effective appeal. Holdman’s clearinghouse focused foremost on death row inmates who were at imminent risk of execution. Prior to the existence of the clearinghouse, death row inmates in Florida were guaranteed the right to a public defender while filing just their first appeal to the Supreme Court of Florida, after which the inmate, who was often indigent and not educated in the law, was no longer guaranteed legal representation to deal with the rest of their possible appeals. On June 19, 1986, Holdman won the American Judicature Society’s Special Merit Citation for her work with Florida’s death row inmates.

The Florida Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice struggled to find an adequate number of attorneys to represent every capital defendant and death row inmate in need of legal representation, and it also struggled with limited funds. As a result, in 1985, the Office of Capital Collateral Representative (CCR), a centralized government-funded organization, was founded by The Florida Bar. CCR, which, in its first year, received five times more funding than the clearinghouse had, ultimately replaced Holdman’s clearinghouse in providing attorneys to capital defendants and death row inmates, although Holdman also worked with CCR as their chief investigator.

After Florida

Following her work with the CCR, Holdman relocated to San Francisco, California, where she continued working in anti-death penalty advocacy at one of the California appellate projects. Her later work focused less on helping death row inmates through the appellate process, and more on helping with pretrial investigations.

After helping to prevent Ted Kaczynski from being sentenced to death and helping him to obtain a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, Kaczynski gifted her his infamous shack in Montana, where he had planned many of his crimes. The U.S. government refused to allow Holdman to keep the shack.

Holdman’s final client was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the main participants in the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. Around that time, she studied Islam and ultimately converted “in solidarity with people who have been unjustly scrutinized and persecuted by the government.”

Holdman later moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she worked at the Center for Capital Assistance in training lawyers and investigators to conduct pretrial investigations on inmates’ backgrounds and develop evidence to secure life sentences for capital murder defendants.

Later life and death

Holdman spent her final years in New Orleans. She died of gallbladder cancer in her New Orleans home on July 12, 2017, at the age of 70. Because of her work in Mohammed’s case, and because of her conversion to Islam, she received a Muslim burial.

Gary Sowards

Jackie Tully

Charlie Pizarro

Susan Garvey

Nancy Pemberton

— Defence Psychiatrists —

Sally Johnson

The government psychiatrist determined that Kaczynski was competent to stand trial.

Role: Determined that Kaczynski was paranoid schizophrenic but competent to stand trial.

Born: In 1954.

Resides: In Raleigh, N.C.

Education: Undergraduate degree from Pennsylvania State University in University Park; medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1976. Johnson earned her degrees in five years through an accelerated program. She spent her internship and residency at Duke University.

Career: Johnson is associate warden and chief psychiatrist at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C. She began work as a staff psychiatrist at the facility in 1979 to repay a public health scholarship. Now, she supervises medical services for about 1,000 inmates, conducts assessments and oversees a training program. Johnson also teaches courses in psychiatry and law at Duke University.

Notable cases: At the age of 29, Johnson headed a team that evaluated John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate former President Ronald Reagan in 1981. She testified that while he had personality disorders, Hinckley was in control of his behavior and competent to stand trial.

In 1989, Johnson was tapped to examine former televangelist Jim Bakker, facing fraud and conspiracy charges, after his attorneys questioned his mental state. She found no evidence that he was psychotic, but labeled him “passive-aggressive,” easily manipulated and somewhat vain.

Johnson also examined New York mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, whose defense lawyers said he was delusional and suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Prosecutors said Gigante, facing murder-conspiracy and racketeering charges, was faking mental illness. Johnson and other psychiatric experts concluded that he may have suffered from dementia, but also could have faked signs of mental illness.

The outcomes: Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital. Bakker and Gigante were convicted.

Sidenote: Hinckley, interviewed 57 times by Johnson, wrote her a poem, “A Poem for My Favorite Pregnant Psychiatrist.”

Impressions: “Sally Johnson is known for being very thorough in her evaluations, and very fair in the conclusions she draws,” said John Monahan, a psychologist and law professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who has crossed professional paths with the psychiatrist. “She is known for calling the shots as she sees them.”

“The Bureau of Prisons sort of trots her out when they want a certain result,” said Jack Martin, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer who represented a murder defendant last year whom Johnson found competent but suffering from a personality disorder. “... Her future is with, and depends on, the bureau.”

Family: Married with two children.

Related items:

• Fair or biased? Views vary on Kaczynski psychiatrist (Jan. 15, 1998)

• High-profile cases thrust psychiatrist into the limelight (Jan. 14, 1998)

• Psychiatrist playing mental chess with Kaczynski (Jan. 13, 1998)

• Psychiatric Competency Report

Dr. Julie Kriegler

In his section 2255 motion, Kaczynski stated that his consent to the filing of the 12.2(b) notice was “reluctant”;  that he consented “under pressure from the defense team”;  and that his agreement was conditioned on assurance by counsel that the defense team “would make no use of ‘disease’ or ‘defect,’ but only of the ‘condition’ aspect of the Rule,” and that the purpose of the notice was to allow psychologist Julie Kriegler, “who did not seem to think that [Kaczynski] suffered from serious mental illness,” to testify at his trial. There is no reason to doubt these facts and we are required, under the applicable rules, to assume that they are true.

— Prosecutors —

Robert J. Cleary

The federal prosecutor came on the Unabomber case after 1994 slaying of Thomas Mosser.

Role: Lead prosecutor, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: 1956.

Resides: In Manhattan.

Education: Earned degrees from the College of William and Mary in Virginia and from Fordham University Law School in New York in 1980. Returned to Fordham in 1991 as an adjunct professor, teaching a semester-long seminar to second- and third-year law students selected to serve as interns with federal and New York state prosecutors.

Career: Worked as a private attorney until winning a job with the tax division of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., in 1984. Two and a half years later joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Manhattan, which has jurisdiction over Wall Street. Rose to head of the major crimes unit, and prosecuted some of the most complex fraud and embezzlement cases of the last decade.

Present job: Tapped in 1994 as first assistant U.S. attorney — second-in-command — for the Northern District of New Jersey, a job he still holds while on special assignment for the Unabomber case.

Notable cases: In 1989 successfully prosecuted a New York attorney and his colleague for a complex $1.6 billion tax-fraud scheme.

The Unabomber case: Two months after joining the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office led the investigation into the murder of Thomas Mosser, an ad executive killed by a package bomb sent to his North Caldwell, N.J., home from the Unabomber.

Impressions: “He is meticulous, extremely calm under pressure and decent,” Daniel Richman, a law professor at Fordham who once worked with Cleary, said of him in 1996. “ ... He’s just so unflappable — he really conveys a sense of integrity.”

Sidenote: Has run the New York City Marathon and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Married: To Marguerite Abbruzzese, a federal prosecutor in New York. The couple has no children. Cleary’s father was a New York City policeman.

Related items:

• Top Unabom prosecutor called ‘unflappable’ (June 25, 1996)

R. Steven Lapham

The Unabomber case has thrust the Sacramento federal prosecutor into the national spotlight.

Role: Prosecutor, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: In San Bernardino, Calif., in 1953.

Education: Attended University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated from Hastings College of the Law in 1979.

Professional career: Worked as a civil litigator in San Francisco for four years before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento in 1984; spent first three years there defending claims against the government, then shifted to the criminal division.

Notable cases: Prosecuted cases including an $80 million investor fraud scheme involving offshore banks, a conspiracy to fool wineries by mislabeling grapes, and the 1992 trial of Katherine Pappadopoulos, who was accused of conspiring with her husband, Constantine, to burn down their 10,000-square-foot home while they vacationed in Greece. She was convicted of arson and conspiracy charges. Her husband is a fugitive.

The Unabomber case: Assigned to the Unabom task force — run jointly by the FBI, U.S. Postal Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — in April 1993.

On the Kaczynski trial: “This is a big case nationally, but no different from any case we have to try,” Lapham said. “Our job is to put the evidence together and present it to a jury.”

Impressions: “He projects an image of confidence,” veteran Sacramento defense lawyer Clyde Blackmon has said of Lapham. “He’s not flashy, but he’s straightforward and competent.”

Sidenote: Enjoys skiing, mountain and road biking, reading, cooking and appreciating wine.

Family: Married; has a daughter.

Related items:

• Local prosecutor in national spotlight (April 13, 1996)

Stephen Freccero

The San Francisco federal prosecutor has been on the Unabomber case since 1993.

Role: Prosecutor, U.S. vs. Kaczynski.

Born: In Baltimore in 1959.

Education: Majored in religion at Wesleyan University; earned law degree from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Career: Worked for Morrison & Foerster, a San Francisco legal firm, for a year before joining the U.S. attorney’s office there in 1989. Took a year off in 1992 to study Italian law in Florence as a Fulbright scholar.

The Unabomber case: Began handling legal issues for the San Francisco-based Unabom task force — run jointly by the FBI, U.S. Postal Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — in 1993.

On the job: “You live and breathe your cases — you have to,” Freccero told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. “My beeper has gone off in every conceivable place. We have canceled vacations.”

Impressions: San Francisco public defender Barry Portman told the Chronicle in 1996 that Freccero is someone “you would want to be in a foxhole with. What he will disdain is notoriety. What he will enjoy is the challenge. I think he is really a superstar.”

Sidenote: Holds a first-degree black belt in judo.

Family: Married with a family. His father is a Dante scholar and on the faculty at Stanford University and New York University; mother worked for a number of years as the registrar and planning administrator at Smith College. Has three sisters.

Retrial Lawyers

Richard Bonnie

4 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

2005

Director

Lutz Dammbeck

2 folders worth of letters archived at the Uni. of Michigan.

• The Net; Adorno, LSD & the Internet

• Interview with Lutz Dammbeck

2008

Book Publisher

Patrick Barriot

5 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

A good example of this is the following: In the publication of the edition of The Road to Revolution by the Swiss publishing house Xenia (actually the first edition of what in later editions by other publishing houses would be Technological Slavery), Kaczynski was in fact deceived by Patrick Barriot, a Marxist-Leninist who kept his real ideological stance hidden from Kaczynski until after the book was published, and wrote a crazy epilogue for this book connecting Kaczynski with some communist terrorist groups, rejecting Darwinism, defending leftist ideas, etc.

And this case, though remarkable because of its effects, is not actually an exception but almost the rule. Among all the people Kaczynski put in contact with me, many of them turned out to be undesirable or unreliable people. And a person very close to him, once said to me the same: many of the people that contacted her via Kaczynski were leftists and kooks.

2010

Book Publisher

Feral House

Feral House:[40]

We published his book, Technological Slavery in 2010. He hated that, in what we think very funny choice, made it an e-book too. Ted was furious. Here’s a snip of a letter he sent. Read more in the upcoming Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader (March 2024.)

2011

Auction Collectors

Danh Vo & Julie Ault

Ted K’s journals were bought at auction by a pretentious artist who gets paid a ton to display collections of ‘spectacle’.[41]

Julie Ault visited Benning in the mountains in 2005, where he offered her a recent reproduction of Kaczynski’s code. In 2011, she and Danh Vo were able to procure the actual code system made by Kaczynski for Benning so that he could study and decipher it, in return for making a copy of the code for each of them.

So, after being bought at auction, the journals were being shared between this small group of artists.

And it’s obvious Julie corresponded regularly with Ted because Ted wrote a glowing acknowledgment to her in his latest book Anti-Tech Revolution:[42]

After Susan, the most important person in this project has been Dr. Julie Ault. Julie has read drafts of the various chapters and has called my attention to many weak points in the exposition. I’ve tried to correct these, though I haven’t been able to correct all of them to my (or, I assume, her) satisfaction. In addition, Julie has provided valuable advice on manuscript preparation. But most important of all has been the encouragement I’ve taken from the fact of having an intellectual heavyweight like Julie Ault on my side.

So, it’s highly likely that the journals are also shared between a small group of self-described ‘anti-tech revolutionaries’ like Ted K’s publishers Fitch and Madison.

James Benning

An interview with Benning:[43]

You had mentioned that you got access to Kaczynski’s journals when a friend of yours bought all of them in the auctions a few years ago. What was reading them like?

Yes, I met Danh Vo through Julie Ault, they both came down to Buenos Aires to see a number of my films that were at the festival there. He’s also visited me in the mountains a few times and when he heard that Julie and I wanted Kaczynski’s journals, he came up with the money and bid on them with a real commitment. At the same time he bought Kaczynski’s typewriter, and gave the journals to Julie. He said to me he was very interested in what I would make from them.

At a London art gallery Danh Vo and Julie Ault put on an exhibition which included a framed single sheet of paper with Ted’s codes on it, copied down by the filmmaker James Benning:[44]

An interview with Benning:[45]

Have there been any reactions from Kaczynski, his brother, or any of the Unabomber’s victims to the film? Are you concerned about “fallout” from having made this film — personal repercussions or unintended effects?

At first, I’d only heard from Kaczynski indirectly. He at first wished me a place in hell, but later withdraw that opinion. Since then he directly wished me a happy birthday, and as he put it, whenever that may be.

Anti-Tech Radicals

— El Boletin / The Bulletin / Naturaleza Indomita —

Website: Naturaleza Indómita

Contact: elboletin@hotmail.es

• A text dump on the indomistas

Ted Kaczynski:

... it is only since 2011 that I’ve had people who have been willing and able to spend substantial amounts of time and effort in doing research for me ...

Ultimo Reducto

6 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Website: Último-Reducto

Email: ultimo.reducto@hotmail.com

• With Friends Like These... Ultimo Reducto vs. The Friends of Ludd

• A text dump on Ultimo Reducto

Isumatag

“Editorial dedicated to the publication of texts critical of the techno-industrial society.”

Contact: asociacion438@yahoo.es

Website: Isumatag Editions

‘Anonymous with Caution’ / Anónimos con Cautela / Collapse Editions / Ediciones Colapso

Facebook: Ediciones Colapso

Blog: Ediciones Colapso

Contact: anonimoscon.cautela@hotmail.com

Location: Mexico

• Public Criticism of Individualities Tending to the Wild

• Ted Kaczynski on Individualists Tending to the Wild (ITS)

— ITS / Regresión Magazine —

• A text dump on eco-extremism

• Ted Kaczynski on Individualists Tending to the Wild (ITS)

• A text dump on Ultimo Reducto

• Public Criticism of Individualities Tending to the Wild

Xale

• The group’s origins broadly

Camilo Gajardo Escalona

• They Declare Guilty the “Individualist Tending to the Wild” for Explosive Attacks in the RM

Nikolaos Karvounakis

• Satanist ITS Members Communique and Arrest Report

Abe Cabrera

• Who is (censored), a Paralegal or an Eco-Extremist Mafia?

— The Wildist Society —

John Jacobi

• Children of Ted and a Response

• 2016 AMA on Wildism

• A text dump on wildism

2016

Collaborators on his book ‘Anti-Tech Revolution’

Ted:

My thanks are owing above all to Susan Gale. Susan has played the key role in this project and has been indispensable. She has been my star researcher, producing more results and solving more problems, by far, than anyone else; she has ably coordinated the work of other researchers and has done most of the typing.

After Susan, the most important person in this project has been Dr. Julie Ault. Julie has read drafts of the various chapters and has called my attention to many weak points in the exposition. I’ve tried to correct these, though I haven’t been able to correct all of them to my (or, I assume, her) satisfaction. In addition, Julie has provided valuable advice on manuscript preparation.’ But most important of all has been the encouragement I’ve taken from the fact of having an intellectual heavyweight like Julie Ault on my side.

Several people other than Susan have made important research contributions through steady work over a period of time: Brandon Manwell, Deborah___, G.G. Gómez, Valeriev E___, and one other person whose name will not be mentioned here. Patrick S and another person, who prefers not to be named, have provided critically important financial support and have been helpful in other ways as well.

The foregoing are the people who have made major contributions to the project, but I owe thanks also to nine other people whose contributions have been of lesser magnitude: Blake Janssen, Jon H____, and Philip R____ each dug up several pieces of information for me; Lydia Eccles, Dr. David Skrbina, Isumatag (pseudonym), and Ultimo Reducto (pseudonym) have called my attention to information or sent me copies of articles that I’ve found useful; Lydia has also performed other services, and an assistant of Dr. Skrbina’s typed early drafts of Chapter Three and Appendix Three. On the legal front, I owe thanks to two attorneys for their pro-bono assistance: Nancy J. Flint, who took care of copyright registration, and Edward T. Ramey, whose intervention removed a bureaucratic obstacle to the preparation of this book.

— Main Collaborators —

Susan Gale

Ted Kaczynski:

My thanks are owing above all to Susan Gale. Susan has played the key role in this project and has been indispensable. She has been my star researcher, producing more results and solving more problems, by far, than anyone else; she has ably coordinated the work of other researchers and has done most of the typing.

Contact: sgale17@yahoo.com

Ted Kaczynski wrote Susan into his will as ‘copyright heir’, but Julie Herrada and David Skrbina both think who owns Ted’s intellectual property is still up in the air. And this legal essay seems to confirm that ambiguity: The Unabomber Strikes Again

Alex Uziel:

... the copyright is vigorously enforced by his copyright heir and foreign rights agent (CC’d here) ...
... Ms. Susan Gale, Wild Freedom Publishing, LLC
Ms. Flavia Campbell, Esq., Dickinson Wright PLLC

Julie Herrada:

The intellectual rights are not yet settled as far as I know. It is my understanding the Kaczynski had a will but I do not yet know the details.

David Skrbina:

If somebody wanted to go through and had permission, the other problem is permission to use these things and to reproduce them in book form, I don’t know exactly what the rules are going to be going forward on those. It depends on who owns the copyrights to all the stuff and it’s not really clear to me who does at this point.

Julie Ault

Quoting Ted:[46]

After Susan, the most important person in this project has been Dr. Julie Ault. Julie has read drafts of the various chapters and has called my attention to many weak points in the exposition. I’ve tried to correct these, though I haven’t been able to correct all of them to my (or, I assume, her) satisfaction. In addition, Julie has provided valuable advice on manuscript preparation.’ But most important of all has been the encouragement I’ve taken from the fact of having an intellectual heavyweight like Julie Ault on my side.

Art Programme:[47]

Julie Ault visited Benning in the mountains in 2005, where he offered her a recent reproduction of Kaczynski’s code. In 2011, she and Danh Vo were able to procure the actual code system made by Kaczynski for Benning so that he could study and decipher it, in return for making a copy of the code for each of them.

James Bennning Interview:[48]

You had mentioned that you got access to Kaczynski’s journals when a friend of yours bought all of them in the auctions a few years ago. What was reading them like?

Yes, I met Danh Vo through Julie Ault, they both came down to Buenos Aires to see a number of my films that were at the festival there. He’s also visited me in the mountains a few times and when he heard that Julie and I wanted Kaczynski’s journals, he came up with the money and bid on them with a real commitment. At the same time he bought Kaczynski’s typewriter, and gave the journals to Julie. He said to me he was very interested in what I would make from them.

James Benning:[49]

On New Year’s Day 2011, Julie and I crafted a letter together. Julie had learned about my Two Cabins project and thought it was pertinent to contact Theodore John Kaczynski. Near the end of January we received a response.

Ted Kaczynski in 2011:[50]

January 18, 2011

Dear Ms. Ault,

Thank you for your interesting letter dated January 1, 2011. My focus is almost exclusively on a practical problem (to put it succinctly), how to get rid of the technoindustrial system before it gets rid of us. I can’t find much time to spend on such issues as the value of solitude, privacy, or wilderness, except to the extent that these issues are relevant to the practical problem. (They are relevant to a point; teaching people the value of solitude or of wilderness, for example, helps to alienate them from the values of the technoindustrial system...)

...As for Thoreau, he’s okay, but I’ve never had any particular admiration for him. You’ll find much better nature writing (in my opinion) in Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year (top-notch!). I can also recommend highly a book by Tom Neale, Alone on My Island (the title is not a figure of speech). Of great interest is Alexander Selkirk, who was the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. An account of Selkirk’s adventures was published back in the 18^th century, and it exists in a modern (like, mid-twentieth century) reprint. You’ll also find some eloquent passages about wilderness and solitude in Calvin Rutstrum, Paradise Below Zero and in Horace Kephart’s Book of Camping and Woodcraft. Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders is of considerable interest too...

Ted Kaczynski in 2016:[51]

For a long time I’ve wondered why my friendship and our “dialogue” (as she calls it) have seemed important to Julie Ault. But when I received a letter from Triple Canopy inviting me to write something in her praise, I noticed a reference in the “prompt” to Julie’s “efforts to engage in dialogue with an ever growing constellation of artists, writers, scholars, activists ...,” and I had a flash of insight: Julie is a collector, impelled by the same mania that drives collectors of stamps, coins, autographs, butterflies or Chinese porcelains—except that instead of collecting physical objects Julie collects friends with whom to have dialogues. And I’m an item in her collection!

A short profile on Julie on the Macarthur Fellows Program website:[52]

Artist and Curator | Class of 2018

Redefining the role of the artwork and the artist by melding artistic, curatorial, archival, editorial, and activist practices into a new form of cultural production

Title: Artist and Curator

Location: New York, New York

Age: 60 at time of award

Area of Focus: Curation, Collecting, and Conservation

Julie Ault received a B.A. (1995) from Hunter College of the City University of New York and a Ph.D. (2011) from the Malmö Art Academy of Lund University. She was a co-founder of the art collective Group Material (active between 1979 and 1996), and her work as an artist and curator has been exhibited at the São Paulo and Whitney Biennials and at such venues as Artists Space, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Secession, Vienna, among others. She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles, Portland State University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Cooper Union, and the California College of the Arts. Her additional publications include Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (2010), Two Cabins by James Benning (2011), and In Part: Writings by Julie Ault (2017).

— Research Contributors —

“made important research contributions through steady work over a period of time”

Brandon Manwell

The FBI Investigation of Forest Anon:

United Neo-Luddist Front Member:

I denounce any violence. I recently watched Forest Anon’s video about the FBI. Forest Anon had his home town searched and family questioned. This will not happen to me. He has said things that aren’t nearly as bad as I have done, although my past remarks were ironic if not, edgy. I do not wish for my aging grandfather to wonder whether his grandson is a domestic terrorist. This is for my family.

I also may resign in the future. I am looking for potential successors. Specifically one that hasn’t already asked already.

Forest Anon’s YouTube & Instagram

Deborah___

G.G. Gómez,

Valeriev E___

‘a person whose name will not be mentioned here’

Potentially Alex Uziel(?). President of the publishing company set up to solely publish Ted K’s books. You can find him making ‘return to monkey’ memes on reddit to try and advance ‘the cause’ and appearing on Anti-Tech Collective YouTube videos.

Website #1: Fitch & Madison

Website #2: Debunking the Ted Kaczynski “MK Ultra” myth

Contact: info@fitchmadison.com

— Financial Supporters —

“provided critically important financial support and have been helpful in other ways as well.”

Patrick SS

‘a person who prefers not to be named’

— Smaller Contributors —

“nine other people whose contributions have been of lesser magnitude”

— dug up several pieces of information for me —

Blake Janssen

Jon H____

Philip R____

— called my attention to info —

Ted:

called my attention to information or sent me copies of articles that I’ve found useful

Lydia has also performed other services, and an assistant of Dr. Skrbina’s typed early drafts of Chapter Three and Appendix Three.

Lydia Eccles

Potentially one of the lengthiest correspondences, checking out at 15 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Boston artist Lydia Eccles ran a “Unabomber for President” campaign in 1996 with support from the anarchist collective CrimethInc.

At a party in Boston on September 19^th, 1995, Lydia Eccles read the so-called Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. Impressed by the text in her hands, freshly published by two of the main newspapers of the country and written by Ted Kaczynski (the most searched US-terrorist of history), Lydia Eccles wonders: what would happen in the upcoming elections if people would vote for a fugitive? The materialization of this question will start shortly after by initiating a political campaign for the Unabomber in the 1996 presidential elections via write-in votes—votes cast by writing in the name of a candidate not appearing in the ballot. Shaped as a political action committee, influenced by ideas of the Situationist International or Jacques Ellul, and in collaboration with different communities around the USA, the campaign would end up having 8 headquarters, a website—which at that time was extremely rare,—and large coverage in the press. With the slogan “if elected, he will not serve”, the Unabomber Presidential Campaign was a form of inhabiting and occupying the pre-existing structure of the American electoral system while offering US-citizens the possibility of voting against that very same system.

Lydia Eccles, Unabomber campaign flyer, 1996 Exhibition copy Courtesy of the artist

Dr. David Skrbina

Website: David Skrbina

11 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Skrbina is an academic who has spent decades trying to start up an area of propaganda, sorry, philosophy that argues against all modern technology. He discusses Ted in his classes trying to get his students on board with creating a revolution that will bring us to David’s personal LARPland of medieval technology.

He tried to get elected with the Green Party once, utterly failed. You will see him praising Ted as a “revolutionary of our times” in Ted’s books, or defending him whenever there is a TV series about Ted. There is no love lost between Ted K fans however, as his book “The Metaphysics of Technology” has been criticized by Ultimo Reducto, another Ted K fan:

The author tries to downplay the human sacrifices that some of these ancient civilizations carried out, saying that the supposed psychological effects on the people of modern societies (basically rendering them insensitive or less compassionate), allegedly caused by the fictional violence in movies, videogames and television, would be much worse than the very real thousands of deaths (and the subsequent terror) caused by human massive sacrifices in those ancient civilizations. And he isn’t even fazed!

In the same book Skrbina calls for a ban on all guns saying the solution to guns is not “more guns, but less guns”. Ted himself is not opposed to guns and states any attempt to ban small scale technology is impractical at best.

— On the legal front —

I owe thanks to two attorneys for their pro-bono assistance.

Nancy J. Flint

“[T]ook care of copyright registration”

Edward T. Ramey

“intervention removed a bureaucratic obstacle to the preparation of this book.”

Other Correspondents

John H. Richardson

Two years ago, I started trading letters with Kaczynski. His responses are relentlessly methodical and laced with footnotes, but he seems to have a droll side, too. “Thank you for your undated letter postmarked 6/11/18, but you wrote the address so sloppily that I’m surprised the letter reached me …”

---

2021

Greg Johnson

• Greg Johnson’s Rational Wiki

• A text dump on Counter-Currents

• Ecofascism: An Aberrant Branch of Leftism

Greg:

I’d like to take partial credit, at least for people asking him about Eco fascism because, well, it was part of my agenda for corresponding with him. I knew it would be inevitable.

Present

Anti-Tech Groups, Projects & Personalities

Anti-Tech Collective — Griffin Kiegiel, Alex Uziel, David Skrbina, etc.

Website: Anti-Tech Collective

Contact: antitechcollective@protonmail.com

This is pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s a bunch of zealots that aim to further Ted’s cause and go after anyone who dares spout heresy against Saint Uncle Ted. They have a YouTube channel where they upload interviews and public discussions which they announce on their website.

In a recent spat with a Ted Kaczynski archive, the anti-tech collective said they expected the site would soon be taken down by Fitch & Madison (the publisher of Teds books, and made of ‘anti-tech revolutionaries’). This was due to claims of copyright, but also because it is made up of “pro-tech leftists” and likely because the site uploads material (some of which are his journals) that does not show Ted in the best way.

Fitch & Madison / Alex Uziel

President of the publishing company set up to solely publish Ted K’s books. You can find him making ‘return to monkey’ memes on reddit to try and advance ‘the cause’ and appearing on Anti-Tech Collective YouTube videos.

Website #1: Fitch & Madison

Website #2: Debunking the Ted Kaczynski “MK Ultra” myth

Contact: info@fitchmadison.com

Alex Uziel:

... the copyright is vigorously enforced by his copyright heir and foreign rights agent (CC’d here) ...
... Ms. Susan Gale, Wild Freedom Publishing, LLC
Ms. Flavia Campbell, Esq., Dickinson Wright PLLC

Ultimo Reducto

6 folders worth of letters archived at the U of Michigan.

Website: Último-Reducto

Email: ultimo.reducto@hotmail.com

• With Friends Like These... Ultimo Reducto vs. The Friends of Ludd

• A text dump on Ultimo Reducto

Isumatag

“Editorial dedicated to the publication of texts critical of the techno-industrial society.”

Contact: asociacion438@yahoo.es

Website: Isumatag Editions

Wilderness Front / qpooqpoo

• Wilderness Front

• Reddit

• A text dump on qpooqpoo

Neo-Luddite Hub

• Discord Link

Karaçam

• Karaçam

• A text dump on Karacam

Garden Zine / Pierce Skinner / Yoursforwildnature

Website: Genesis & Garden

Contact: antitechquarterly@proton.me

• An Editor of a ‘Kaczynskist’ Journal Had His House Raided & Phone Seized

• The Letter That Broke the News on Ted’s Terminal Cancer

• Garden Issue 4

Άγρια Χώρα

• Άγρια Χώρα

Aleph Zero-Categorical

• Aleph Zero-Categorical

The Techno-Skeptic

• The Techno-Skeptic

The Convivial Society

• The Convivial Society

Jorma

• jorma (@deepecofren)

Chad A Haag

Chad moved to live in India where he considers getting food poisoning from spoiled goat meat to be far superior to living in America (this actually happened).

He has a YouTube channel where he larps on about Evola, Ted, Varg and other such individuals and considers them the greatest philosophers of modern times (This includes Jaques Ellul so he’s not entirely wrong). He’s pretty much your typical pagan third positionist.

If this wasn’t enough, he has written a series of self-published books. In one book he literally discusses anime in a socio-political context. Despite claiming he doesn’t use the internet or the TV much.

In his Kaczynski book (which he boasted was the first proper look at Ted) he compares destroying the “system” to Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.

“But the System does not allow even the minutest expression of genuine freedom, because genuine freedom would disrupt the essence of the System by calling into question its technological infrastructure. The metaphor of the Death Star is therefore doubly fitting, since Luke Skywalker had to penetrate the surface level and descend deep into the belly of the beast in order to destroy what was quite literally a giant technological monstrosity which threatened the survival of entire planets and species of natural beings.”

Jeremy Grolman

Website: For Wild Nature

Contact: jgrolman@gmail.com

Used to help John Jacobi run the Wild Will Coalition.

• 2016 AMA on Wildism

• A text dump on wildism

Normandie

Website: End the Machine

Contact: Website Contact Form

Misc.

Unknown

The names Corson, Grabar and Janice Folsom Scriba were listed in Envelope X, but are missing from the original draft of this book that Context Books typed up. Envelope X is described as including “a list giving the real names of people whom I have identified in this book by first names, initials, or abbreviations.” But perhaps they’re referred to in earlier handwritten drafts or some other notes contined within the ‘Refutation Documents’ category of documents housed at the University of Michigan.

Unsorted

• Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

• Envelope X

Terry Lundgren

The three Tripton boys.

Mr. Howard

Kenneth Keniston.

Fred Hapgood and Bob Crosman

Gerald Burns

Rich Williams

Leslie Nieman and Keith Hrieben

(or Hreben, Ted was unclear on the spelling).

Gwendolya Halm

Leon Kenneth Nerpel

Neil Dunlop

Tim Bennett

Denis Dubois

Jay Ce. and Linda E.

J___ P___

Michael J. Donahge

Ted’s first lawyer, Michael J. Donahge at Federal Defenders of Montana. P.O. Box 250, Helena MT 5924–0250.

Linda Keene Vanvechten

Charles Porter

Robert M. Rippey

James Oberton

Prof. X.Y.

Norma Jean Vanderlaan

the Vanderlaans

Dolores Williams

Ken Biel

Ed Weber

David and Shirley Hockbecker

John Jenner

Jack McInerny

Wayne Tripton

Ruth Knudson

Larry Heinen

Mike Indovina

Al Nc.

[1] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[2] Context Books Correspondence

[3] Ted Kaczynski’s 1959 Autobiography

[4] Truth Versus Lies

[5] Theresa Kintzs’ Interview with Ted Kaczynski

[6] Ted Kaczynski’s 1979 Autobiography

[7] From the Unabomber to the Incels: Angry Young Men on Campus

[8] Ted Kaczynski’s 1979 Autobiography

[9] Moroccan Islam; Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center

[10] The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach

[11] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] FBI Trap Mad Bomber

[19] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Unabomber; In His Own Words

[24] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ted Kaczynski’s 1979 Autobiography

[33] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Adrift in Solitude, Kaczynski Traveled a Lonely Journey

[37] Truth versus Lies (Volunteers Update)

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Feral House’s Twitter

[41] untitled by Danh Vo

[42] Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How by Ted Kaczynski

[43] Sympathy for the Unabomber by Allan MacInnis

[44] untitled by Danh Vo

[45] Sympathy for the Unabomber by Allan MacInnis

[46] Anti-Tech Revolution

[47] untitled by Danh Vo

[48] Sympathy for the Unabomber by Allan MacInnis

[49] Benefit Programme

[50] Two Cabins

[51] Benefit Programme

[52] Macarthur Fellows Program