Now Playing
The Voice in the Manifesto: How a Brother Ended 17 Years of Terror
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ted Kaczynski built his bombs in silence for seventeen years — until a 35,000-word manifesto published by the New York Times gave him away to the one person who knew his voice. This chapter traces the Harvard origins, the UNABOM investigation, and the brother who made the call that ended it.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
April third, nineteen ninety-six. FBI agents approach a ten-by-twelve-foot wooden structure near Lincoln, Montana.
To understand where Ted Kaczynski ended up, you have to go back to where he started. Not Montana.
The first bomb arrived in nineteen seventy-eight at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus. It injured a security officer.
In nineteen ninety-five, Kaczynski changed the terms. He contacted the New York Times and the Washington Post with an ultimatum.
Publishing the manifesto was supposed to spread the ideology. What it actually did was end the campaign.
When agents found Kaczynski he was in the early stages of constructing another bomb. The cabin contained more than forty thousand handwritten pages of journals, diagrams, and notes.
He served twenty-seven years. For most of that time he was held at the ADX Florence supermax facility in Colorado, the same institution that has housed some of the most dangerous federal prisoners in American history.
Three people died because of Ted Kaczynski. Twenty-three more were injured, several of them permanently.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.