[suspenseful music]
- Tonight, an evil genius uses homemade bombs
to terrorize a nation.
- It was designed to create a mass explosion,
which would have brought that plane down.
- Millions of Americans are terrified
as to where the next bomb is going to end up.
- He leaves no trace, no fingerprints, no DNA.
It's like hunting a ghost.
- Federal agents join forces and launch a massive manhunt,
but still, this mastermind is always one step ahead.
- It seems like he's taunting law enforcement,
and to him, it's kind of a game of cat and mouse.
- Now, we'll explore the top theories in the FBI's hunt
for one of history's most notorious criminals
as they finally crack the case of the Unabomber.
[rousing music]
[suspenseful music]
- [Laurence] 11:50 a.m., November 15th, 1979.
30 minutes after departing Chicago,
passengers aboard an American Airlines 727
bound for Washington DC
hear a muffled thump in the baggage hold,
followed by a sucking sound.
- [Sami] Following that noise,
you start to get this chemical smell
in the cabin of the plane.
The pilot makes an initial announcement
to the passengers on board, all 72 of them, and explains that,
"Oh, we just have a problem with a valve in the plane.
Nothing to worry about, folks.
Everything's gonna be fine."
[passengers panicking]
20 minutes after the pilot's announcement, however,
you start to get all of this thick smoke filling the cabin,
filling the fuselage.
- The crew doesn't know what happened.
All they know is a big bang went off.
All the passengers in the cabin
are now putting on their oxygen masks,
and there's a lot of smoke,
and they've gotta get that plane down.
- [Sami] The real fear is that this fire
might end up actually reaching
either the hydraulic system of the plane,
or worse, the fuel tanks of the plane,
which would cause it to explode.
- The pilot comes on and says to the passengers,
"Brace for impact.
We're gonna land, 20 minutes, at Dulles Airport."
[passengers screaming]
- [Laurence] The plane descends at over 600 miles an hour,
twice the normal speed of approach,
as fire trucks and ambulances scramble to the runway.
- [Kavitha] Thankfully, the pilot is able
to successfully land the plane.
All the passengers are safely evacuated,
and at least 12 passengers are rushed to the hospital
for potential smoke inhalation.
[siren wailing]
- [Laurence] The terror and trauma are palpable,
but it could have been so much worse.
- Eventually they managed to extinguish the fire,
and they discover the source of the explosion.
It's a pipe bomb that's housed inside a wooden box.
It's wrapped in craft paper,
and been completely covered in stamps
to make it look like a nondescript package.
It's been mailed from a fairly large facility
in suburban Chicago.
- Now, at the time, air mail wasn't regularly scanned
by metal detectors before being put onto a plane,
so the bomb was able to make it very easily
onto the aircraft with no real suspicion by anyone.
- Post-analysis identified
that this was a very sophisticated bomb,
in that the trigger mechanism was
what we call an altimeter bomb.
So when the plane reached a certain height,
the bomb would detonate.
[explosion thumping]
- If the bomb had gone off the way the bomber had intended,
there would've been a major fire on that plane,
blowing out the fuselage and bringing that plane down.
- Normally when you have a fairly intact bomb,
it's pretty easy for investigators
to use the components to trace the origins of that bomb.
But in this case, they find that whoever built this bomb
did a really good job of removing any kind of traceable
or identifiable information from the components.
- [Laurence] The FBI conducts a nationwide search
for any bombings that used similar devices
and find two matches
in a pair of attacks at Chicago's
Northwestern University.
The first took place a year and a half earlier.
- [Lis] May 25th, 1978, Northwestern University.
A woman sees a package on the
ground in the parking lot,
picks it up.
She brings it to campus police, who open it up.
[explosion booming]
It's a loud explosion.
Everybody's scared, but nobody's really hurt.
- [Sami] Cut to a year later, in May of 1979,
also Northwestern University.
You have a grad student who also gets a package,
and when he opens it,
the package explodes, and this time, the grad student
receives minor cuts and minor burns.
- [Lis] So here you have two
bombs in 1978 and 1979
that really don't
garner much attention,
either nationally or even within the FBI.
Then you have, again in 1979,
the bomb going off on the airline.
That gets national attention.
That's spread all across the national media.
- The FBI, once they finished their post investigation,
made the determination that the airplane bomb
was constructed in exactly the same manner
as the other two bombs, leading them to conclude
that the individual who placed the bomb on the plane
was in fact the same individual
who placed or sent the other two bombs.
- And their concern is that
if they don't find this person soon,
these bombs are just going to become
more and more sophisticated
and ultimately, more and more dangerous.
- [Laurence] But before the FBI
can develop any viable leads,
the so-called Junkyard Bomber strikes again.
On June 10th, 1980, in the exclusive Chicago suburb
of Lake Forest,
Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines,
opens a parcel delivered to his home mailbox.
- [Lis] Percy Wood is celebrating his 60th birthday.
He thinks it's maybe a belated birthday present,
and when he takes a look at it,
it looks like the book, the "Ice Brothers,"
which has to do with World War II.
That's something he might be interested in.
- Wood is examining the book.
As he turns it back to the cover,
he notices that several of the pages are glued together,
and it's at this point, boom.
- The bomb exploded in Wood's hands late this afternoon,
and he is now being treated
in a hospital just outside Chicago...
- He gets shrapnel in his face, in his body.
You've got three-quarter pipe that rips across his thigh.
- Wood is alive, but he requires emergency surgery,
and it definitely seems that the bomber is honing his skill.
These bombs are getting more and more deadly.
- [Laurence] Agents from the FBI, ATF, and US Postal Service
now join forces and race to identify the attacker.
They also give the manhunt a new case name, UNABOM,
short for university and airline bomber.
And the attacker, he's now known as the Unabomber.
This mysterious attacker will continue to strike
for many years to come.
- Over the course of 18 years, the Unabomber sends 16 bombs
to homes, institutions, and offices across the country.
In all, 23 people are injured, three people die,
and millions across America are terrified.
This is no longer a localized incident.
- The Unabomber investigation would involve
ultimately more than 150 special agents across the country,
and it would cost more than $50 million.
That's more than any investigation in history
up and to that point.
- [Laurence] Federal agents are increasingly desperate
to catch this phantom and end his deadly reign of terror.
But first they have to figure out, who is the Unabomber?
- Experts start digging through the devices
to see whether or not they might have missed a clue
as to who this Unabomber might be.
One of the things that they notice
is that the metal pieces on the bombs
are fused together in a way that an airline worker
would fuse metal together.
And so, this clue leads investigators
to who they think the Unabomber might actually be.
[suspenseful music]
- [Lis] Looking at the welding of these bombs,
and they're very similar one to the other,
maybe the universities were test drives
for what the bomber really wanted to do,
which is take down an airline.
So the FBI early on tries to get a profile,
and this is honed as cases go on.
But at first they thought,
somebody maybe in their 30s to 40s,
male, blue collar welder.
- [Michael] The bombs were housed in
a custom-made wood casing.
The individual took great care in constructing the bombs.
The FBI concluded that this individual
had some obsessive- compulsive tendencies,
perhaps was a loner, had isolated themselves
from mainstream society.
- Imagine you've been fired from American Airlines or United
and you're angry about that.
This is a way to get back,
and that's what the FBI thought.
They looked for recent fires at American Airlines,
they crosschecked with criminal history with those people,
they went out and interviewed these people.
We're talking about thousands and thousands of man hours
trying to track down hundreds and hundreds of employees
from different airlines.
- But despite all of these efforts,
it turns out that all of their leads
for any potential airline workers being the Unabomber
come up empty.
All investigators can ultimately do is
wait to see if the Unabomber strikes again,
and hope that in his next attack he slips up.
[suspenseful music]
- May 5th, 1982, Nashville, Tennessee.
A secretary working in the computer science department
of Vanderbilt University opens a package
addressed to her boss and gets a horrifying surprise.
- It immediately explodes, peppering her entire upper boy
with powder burns and lacerations.
She's rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery,
but she does survive.
- [Lis] When this bomb goes off
and hurts a secretary in Tennessee,
they realize the Unabomber is back,
and now, he or she is targeting universities again.
- Now the task force shifts its focus to,
okay, maybe this isn't somebody who's an airline employee,
but maybe it's somebody that actually just holds
a resentment towards higher education.
[suspenseful music]
- [Eric] The first four bombings
are originating from Chicago,
so they think this is
maybe a Chicago bomber.
Then there's a bombing
at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville.
And then they find out a few months earlier
there's been an attempted bombing in Salt Lake City, Utah.
- [Sami] With the bomb that was defused out west
at the University of Utah, agents start to think,
"Maybe we've been looking in the wrong spot,"
and they start to focus their efforts out west.
- [Laurence] Sure enough, the Unabomber's next attack
takes place at the University of California Berkeley.
- Now in 1982, a professor of electrical engineering,
he sees this package on the floor
with a wire sticking out of it.
He's just headed to go get a cup of coffee,
but he picks it up to be a nice guy.
[explosion booming]
The bomb explodes.
The right side of his body, his face, his arm,
everything is hit by shrapnel.
- [Laurence] Three years later on the very same campus,
the Unabomber strikes again,
this time at a computer lab.
A Berkeley graduate student notices
an unclaimed binder attached to a plastic box.
- [Kavitha] John Hauser.
He's an Air Force captain and an astronaut candidate.
He decides to investigate further
and unlatches the plastic box.
- [Sami] When he ends up opening the box, it detonates.
[explosion booming]
The ring on his right hand just gets blown off,
flies six feet, and embeds itself
into the plaster wall nearby.
It also destroys his right arm,
it does severe nerve damage,
and it also blinds him in his left eye.
- He is lucky to have survived the blast,
but his dreams of becoming an astronaut are over in a flash.
- [Laurence] Explosive experts confirm,
this is the work of the Unabomber.
It's his eighth known attack,
and his bombs are getting more sophisticated.
- These bombs are more lethal,
they're exploding at a higher pace,
and they're causing greater injury.
- Unlike the previous Unabomber devices,
which were mailed to their targets,
the two Berkeley bombs were hand delivered to the building,
which suggests that whoever the bomber is
is really familiar with the Berkeley campus.
- So task force members decide to pull
Berkeley employee records to try to see if they can find
any employee, possibly a professor,
'cause again, highly intelligent individual,
who may hold a grudge toward the university.
- Berkeley's significant,
Berkeley's one of the centers of the counterculture.
In the 1960s, there are a ton of student protests
against the Vietnam War.
Is this someone who has been part of that movement?
- [Laurence] But once again,
the task force is unable to identify any viable suspects,
and the Unabomber carries on with a new boldness.
- 1985 turns out to be a pretty busy year for the Unabomber,
because the ninth device that goes off is a mail bomb
that explodes at a Boeing plant in Washington state,
and then you have a 10th bomb, another mail bomb,
at the University of Michigan.
- The bomber is getting better,
and yet the FBI and the ATF are no closer
in getting their man, or woman, or organization.
They don't know.
- [Laurence] As 1985 continues,
things get even more frustrating for law enforcement,
as the bomber turns to what feels like a random target,
this time with a lethal result.
- [Sami] It's December 11th, 1985,
at a Sacramento, California computer store.
The manager of the store, 38-year-old Hugh Scrutton,
goes outside to move this pile of lumber
with nails inside of the boards from behind his car.
As he goes to move the wood,
[explosion booming]
he detonates a pipe bomb.
It explodes right there in front of him.
- He's injured terribly, and dies 30 minutes later.
For the first time, on device number 11,
the Unabomber has killed someone.
This elevates it to a new level.
- [Lis] All these years, they've been focusing
on universities and airlines,
and here you have a manager of a computer store.
What rhyme or reason can the FBI make
of what's going on?
- [Laurence] Then, in early 1987, the FBI catches a break.
- On February 20th, 1987,
at a second computer store,
this time in Salt Lake City, Utah,
an employee spots a suspicious
man lurking near her car.
She sees the man pull something suspicious
out of a canvas bag and place it near her tire.
So she asks another employee to go check it out,
and within seconds, it explodes.
- There for the very first time in the investigation,
there's someone who thinks they've seen the bomber.
- [Michael] So the FBI bring in a sketch artist,
who then begins to put together what the Unabomber,
or what this individual, looked like.
White male, approximately 5'10", 160 pounds,
with curly, reddish hair, wearing sunglasses and a hoodie.
- Federal agents have released the picture
of a suspected mass bomber.
- [Laurence] This sketch is later revised,
and becomes the now infamous image of the Unabomber.
Investigators finally have a real lead
to share with the public.
- Everybody's looking for the Unabomber,
and then nothing happens,
for six years,
no bombings.
So the FBI begins to think
that he's never gonna come out again,
and what happens here is that the FBI
almost gets rid of the task force.
- [Sami] But there are individuals in the FBI,
other agents that say, don't close it up just yet.
They believe that all he's doing
is laying low and continuing to hone and refine
his bomb making skills so they can be that much more deadly.
[suspenseful music]
- [Laurence] It is now 1993,
six years after the Unabomber's last attack.
That June, two mail bombs strike in quick succession,
again to what feel like random targets.
- A prominent scientist,
a geneticist named Dr. Charles Epstein,
who lives in Tiburon, California,
across the bay from San Francisco.
Dr. Epstein receives a package in the mail.
It turns out that the package is a bomb.
- [Reporter] Violence shattered the life and career
of one of the West's most
prominent genetic researchers.
A package bomb blew as Dr. Charles Epstein
opened his mail at his home late Tuesday.
- The force of this bomb blows out the kitchen window,
knocks out the table legs.
This bomb is in a small package,
but it's got a lot of force.
- The explosion is so powerful
that Epstein suffers damage to his right hand,
he gets shrapnel lodged in his abdomen,
and he also suffers permanent hearing damage.
- [Laurence] Just two days later,
another professor is attacked,
this time, across the country at Yale University.
- Bomb number 14 is sent to a computer scientist
named David Gelernter.
- He opens up a small, padded envelope.
- [Reporter] Authorities believe a Yale computer scientist...
- Not only is the size of the bomb different,
gone from being housed in this wooden box
to being in just a padded envelope,
but the detonation got stronger.
[typewriter keys clicking]
The FBI is able to look at the typewriting
on the mailing labels,
and they note that both of the bombs
have these labels from the same typewriter.
[suspenseful music]
So what the task force realizes immediately is,
the Unabomber is back, and he or she is much more forceful.
- [Laurence] On June 24th,
the same afternoon as the Yale bombing,
a third envelope shows up, this time at the New York Times.
- This envelope doesn't contain a bomb,
it contains a letter,
and what's written in that letter
raises the possibility for the first time
that the Unabomber might not be working alone.
- [Laurence] The letter is supposedly written
by a member of a group with the initials FC,
which stands for Freedom Club.
- The author of the letter
claims that they're writing this letter to the Times
for two main reasons.
One, to establish the group's identity,
to let people know who Freedom Club is.
The second reason is so that they can provide a secret code
in all further communication
so that no one else can take responsibility
for bombings that are carried out by Freedom Club.
- The public doesn't know this at the time,
but each of the devices that the Unabomber had sent
had contained a metal disc
with the letters FC engraved in them,
and that disc was designed to withstand the blast.
So it's kind of like a calling card.
- [Lis] In their analysis,
the FBI is also able to determine
that the letter is off the same typewriter
as all of the other mailing labels
on all of the other bombs,
so they know that it is the Unabomber,
calling themselves FC, Freedom Club.
- [Laurence] The letter's author
calls the club an anarchist group.
- This letter gives us the first glimpse
into what could be the inner workings of the minds
behind all of the bombings thus far.
[suspenseful music]
- [Laurence] Despite revealing the group's
alleged identity in the letter,
the author refuses to reveal their motive.
- Is this anarchist group FC really a thing?
What do we do with this?
So many of the clues in Unabomber are like that.
Where does it lead us?
- [Laurence] But in sending this letter,
the Unabomber may have inadvertently
revealed something new.
- [Eric] As they analyze the letter,
they notice there's an indentation.
It's not written out in pencil,
but as if someone was writing something on top of the letter
and there was a mark left from the writing that says,
"Call Nathan R., Wednesday 7:00 p.m."
What does that mean?
- So investigators are now thinking, who is this Nathan R?
Could this person be a member of the Freedom Club?
Could this be a clue
that leads us to the identity of the Unabomber?
- So they started digging into the Nathan Rs
in the United States,
and you can only imagine how many there must be.
They looked at more than 10,000 individuals
to see if there was anything that might somehow correlate
to a person who might be the Unabomber.
- [Sami] But despite all of their Herculean efforts,
nothing comes of it.
It ends up being just another dead end,
and they start to think,
well, maybe they just indented this handwriting
onto that letter to serve as a sort of distraction.
- [Laurence] To move the search forward,
the FBI opens up a tip line with a $1 million reward
for information leading to the Unabomber's arrest.
- People have lots of suspicions about who this could be.
Maybe it's someone they know, maybe it's a family member.
So the UNABOM task force
is being inundated with information.
- When the tip line is opened,
thousands of tips start coming in,
and all of them are investigated.
Many of them really don't lead to anything.
However, there is one name
that comes in from numerous individuals,
over and over again.
- By the mid 1990s, the failure to catch the Unabomber
creates a climate of fear.
People are terrified to open packages or fly in planes
for fear of being killed or maimed by a hidden pipe bomb,
and so far, it feels like there's nothing the FBI can do
to end this reign of terror.
- Adding to the concern,
the Unabomber launches two more fatal attacks,
but these seem much more random.
The first victim is attacked in December of 1994.
It's an advertising executive named Thomas Mosser,
and the attack takes place at his home in New Jersey.
The second victim, four months later,
is a timber industry lobbyist
that goes by the name of Gilbert Murray,
and that happens in Sacramento, California.
- Why these two guys?
I mean, they really don't have
anything in common with each other,
nor do they have anything in common
with the rest of the people
who have been victims of the Unabomber.
- He's gone from someone who was struggling
to make devices that even went off,
to someone who seems to be able to kill at will.
- That summer, with the FBI scrambling
to get any leads on who the Unabomber might be,
[suspenseful music builds]
a notorious fugitive joins the suspect list.
- James Kilgore is a California grad student
turned political activist, and will later become a soldier
in the Symbionese Liberation Army,
which is this radical left wing group.
This is a group that becomes famous, or infamous,
for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974.
It's believed that he helped Patty Hearst
escape from the FBI during a shootout with police.
- He was responsible for planting bombs under police cars
all across the state of California,
and thankfully, none of those ever detonated.
As law enforcement's closing in on the SLA,
Kilgore was wise enough to escape the area
and he's never been heard of since.
And just before Kilgore goes underground,
he puts out a communication to all of his followers
that he's gonna continue the fight
against this tyranny of government.
- 20 years later after he was involved with the SLA,
they're wondering if James Kilgore
is now making good on those threats by all of these bombs.
He certainly would have the expertise to do it,
and certainly the anger to do it.
- [Laurence] Kilgore's ties to Berkeley
and his history with explosives
aren't his only similarities with the Unabomber.
Digging into Kilgore's past turns up even more.
[pensive music]
- [Sami] They find that James Kilgore was raised
about 20 miles north of Berkeley, California,
and that his father is a lumber broker
in Northern California.
And this makes the FBI think
that maybe there's a connection here,
because a lot of these early devices from the Unabomber
have a through line that deals with wood.
- The bombs are made of wood, which is very unusual.
You have one of, the fourth target is Percy Wood,
who lives in Lake Forest, Illinois.
- One of these devices was sent to somebody
that lives on Aspen Drive.
And then you have Gilbert Murray, one of the victims
who was somebody that also worked in the lumber industry.
- During the case, investigators noted
really interesting similarities
between the way in which the SLA bombs
were constructed in those early days
and the way in which Unabomber was constructing his bombs.
- [Laurence] Investigators note the strong similarity
between Kilgore and that infamous sketch.
- By now, he's somebody
that would've been in about his 40s,
and the last time he's seen,
he stands at about 5'10", weighs about 170 pounds,
and he has this reddish, brown hair.
- [Mike] Looking at Kilgore as a suspect made perfect sense,
and the idea that this '70s terrorist
was now reinventing himself wasn't out of reach.
- [Laurence] But those who know James Kilgore
insist he doesn't fit the profile of a serial killer.
- For starters, Patty Hearst describes Kilgore in her book
as a, quote, "model of reason."
The other challenge in pinning Kilgore down
is that the FBI can't find him.
They don't know where he's at.
- [Laurence] Meanwhile,
the Unabomber seems to be getting more brazen,
taunting the media as well as his victims.
- [Eric] A letter arrives at the San Francisco Chronicle,
and it's a short letter, and it says that the Unabomber
is going to place a bomb on an airplane out of LAX
in the next six days,
and this sends the entire country into a panic,
and it turns out that this whole thing was a hoax.
- [Laurence] The Unabomber then sends more letters
to the Washington Post and the New York Times,
but these are very different
and give investigators fresh insights
into the bomber's motives.
- He sends a letter to the Washington Post
and the New York Times saying that he will, FC will,
stop bombings if they publish their 35,000-word manifesto.
What is this manifesto about?
It's a diatribe against the industrial complex,
that computerization is going to kill our society
and must be thwarted.
If the papers publish his manifesto,
FC says, they will stop bombing.
- [Laurence] The papers aren't sure what to do,
and consult with Attorney General Janet Reno
and FBI Director Louis Freeh.
- [Eric] Do we give in to this guy's demands,
do we publish this in the hopes
that he really will stop bombing,
or do we refuse to publish it
because what kind of an example does this set?
- Ultimately, the FBI tell the New York Times
and the Washington Post,
"Go ahead and publish the manifesto.
We realize that there's a risk involved,
but it might be worth the risk.
- [Reporter] The Washington Post published his words
only after speaking with Attorney General Janet Reno
and FBI officials.
The Justice Department hopes to use his own words
to lead investigators
to one of the most hunted men in the country.
- I think if he wrote one sentence or 37,000 words,
he's revealing more of himself
every time he writes anything.
- [Sami] The manifesto's published on
September 19th, 1995.
Millions of people read this manifesto,
and following its publication,
you have thousands of new tips
that are coming into that tip line that the FBI set up
that are providing potentially hundreds of new suspects.
- [Laurence] On November 12th, 1995,
two months after the Unabomber's manifesto is published,
journalist Tom Bates, at the Oregonian,
says he knows who the Unabomber is,
a criminal on the FBI's most wanted list.
- Bates claims that the language used in the manifesto
and the ideas that are espoused in that writing
match up to someone that is known to have planted
bombs and explosives on university campuses in the past
and is someone who is a pretty famed fugitive.
- On August 24th, 1970, at 3:40 in the morning,
the group pull up in a van that they've loaded
with 2,000 pounds of explosives,
preparing to detonate a bomb at a university.
And the man who allegedly built this bomb
and dreamt up this scheme was a 22-year-old student
named Leo Burt.
[suspenseful music]
- [Laurence] Born and raised in Pennsylvania,
Burt came to the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s
to row varsity crew.
But after being cut from the team,
his interests turned more political.
- So he works at the student newspaper
as a student journalist, but one reason
for wanting to carry out these forms of protest
is because he actually covers
the shooting that happens at Kent State,
and he's badly beaten by a police officer
that's putting down that protest that day.
But over time, his protest
starts to lean in a more violent direction.
- On New Year's Eve 1969,
Burt and three associates steal a small plane.
They drop homemade bombs
on the Badger Army Ammunition Plant,
but they don't detonate.
- [Laurence] That summer,
Burt sets his sights on a new target.
- [Sami] On the campus of
the University of Wisconsin Madison at the time,
there is the Army Mathematics Research Center,
which is a government funded
think tank known as Army Math.
- Army Math, as it was known,
was despised by many anti-war activists,
who believed that the center was responsible
for much of the death and destruction in Southeast Asia
and had no place on a government-funded campus.
Burt and his New Year's Eve associates,
they steal a van from a campus parking lot
and fill it with six barrels of fertilizer and fuel oil.
They wait until the wee hours of the morning
and they drive the van to Sterling Hall.
At 3:42 a.m., they light the fuse.
[explosion booming]
[dark tense music]
- [Sami] The bomb explodes,
and this huge rattle is felt all across campus.
Now, the Army Math building itself isn't really touched,
but everything around Army Math
and near Army Math is basically destroyed,
including a physics lab
in which you have a 33-year-old graduate student
who is working late that night.
He ends up dying in the blast.
And there are also five other people in the lab
that are critically injured.
- [Kavitha] Burt's three co-conspirators
are caught, tried and sentenced,
but Burt himself remains a fugitive
throughout the Unabomber's active years.
Journalist Tom Bates writes a book about Burt
and the Sterling Hall bombing.
Years later when the Unabomber's manifesto is published,
he insists that it has to be the work
of the fugitive campus bomber.
Bates cites a magazine article written by Burt
called, "Do We Need a National Organization?"
- The writing is similar, the style is similar,
and so, Tom Bates makes the argument that,
just looking at the language
and the way that the manifesto is written,
it's very much like what Leo Burt wrote many years ago.
- [Sami] He also says that Burt is somebody
that really has no regard for loss of life,
as evidenced by the fact that the Sterling Hall explosion
kills that graduate student and Burt shows no empathy,
instead just decides to flee.
- [Laurence] Federal agents investigate Burt,
claiming that he can't be completely discounted
while still at large,
but someone else reading the manifesto
hears a different voice.
- She recognizes the style, the tone,
and the anger that's present in the manifesto
because she's seen this, but much closer to home.
[suspenseful music]
- [Laurence] It's now late 1995,
17 years after the Unabomber
first began his terrifying attacks.
Linda Patrik, a philosophy professor
from Schenectady, New York
is in Paris on sabbatical.
- She's reading an English language newspaper
with excerpts of the recently published
Unabomber's manifesto,
and the words seem eerily similar
to something she's read before.
This writing contains striking similarities
to some letters that had been sent to her husband,
David Kaczynski, from his estranged brother.
He was furious that
David was marrying Linda
despite never having met her,
and he wrote long, vengeful letters
disparaging their marriage
and the institution of marriage itself.
- [Laurence] Shortly after the manifesto was released,
David comes to Paris for a visit
and Linda shares her concerns
that his brother Ted might be the Unabomber.
- He doesn't believe it at first.
He hasn't read the manifesto yet.
He said, "I know my brother.
He's a little wacky.
He's out there living off the grid.
I know he is strange, but he's sweet.
He wouldn't hurt a fly."
[welding torch sparking]
- He says to Linda,
"I think there's one in a thousand chance
that my brother could be the Unabomber."
And she says, "Well, one in a thousand is significant.
We need to start thinking about this."
- [Lis] And that's when Dave looks up the manifesto.
He's able then to get all the letters
he's received over the years from his brother.
As he and his wife look through all of these letters,
they realize that there is
a very striking similarity.
- [Laurence] In February 1996, David reaches out to the FBI
to share his suspicions,
and turns over a trove of Ted's writings for comparison.
After looking into more than 2,000 suspects,
the task force may finally have their man.
- [Sami] Ted Kaczynski is born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942
to working class parents,
but he's an incredibly gifted student,
especially in mathematics.
He actually scores a 167 on an IQ test,
and he even skips two grades in high school,
graduates by the age of 15,
and is immediately accepted to Harvard.
Once he finishes at Harvard,
he then goes on to University of Michigan
to obtain his master's, and then later his doctorate degree.
- He's quickly hired
by the University of California Berkeley.
He's put on a tenure track as a professor in his mid 20s.
And so, this is a guy who seems to have
a huge future ahead of him.
So that's one story of Ted Kaczynski.
The other story of Ted Kaczynski is that this is someone
who always felt alienated from his peers,
he's always had difficulty making friends.
- At Berkeley, he's not well liked by his students.
They think that he's dull,
and unengaged, and pathologically shy.
And so, in 1969, he resigns without any explanation.
In 1971, he moves to a tiny remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana
where he lives a life off the grid
without electricity or running water.
- [Laurence] Despite the peaceful setting,
his mind is not at rest.
[suspenseful music]
- [Lis] Now, Ted Kaczynski is living off the grid,
as he wanted,
but he's still writing letters to his family,
diatribes against the government,
and socialization and computerization.
Ted Kaczynski is not a happy guy.
The FBI is optimistic.
Now they have a real lead.
They speak with David, they speak with Linda,
and the more that they compare letters
that he's written to them in the past,
they think they have their guy.
- [Laurence] On April 3rd, 1996,
the FBI finally shows up at the Montana cabin.
- They bring their operations teams to Lincoln, Montana.
They have snipers,
they have everyone ready in case things go wrong.
Probably most importantly for them,
they wanna have all of their evidence intact.
- So for 18 years, the FBI has been chasing a ghost,
someone they believe who's highly intelligent,
well-educated, trained, and versed in terrorism
and counter-terrorism activities.
But when they arrest Ted Kaczynski,
they find something completely different.
- [Sami] His clothes have all of these holes in them.
He's covered in ash.
His face, his hair is matted.
He smells.
- As soon as they enter the cabin, it becomes clear
they essentially have a confession
to the UNABOM attacks in physical form.
- [Laurence] It's a treasure trove of evidence.
- Bomb making materials.
There are things linked to the attacks,
like the Smith Corona typewriter
that was used to type copies of the manifesto,
that was used to type some of the letters.
- [Lis] They find 40,000 pages, journal pages,
which explain every single bomb,
how to build a bomb even.
But Ted Kaczynski is proud of his work,
and he writes about it in these journals.
- Under the bed, they find an aluminum wrapped package
addressed to an aerospace company in Texas,
and sure enough, there is a live bomb inside.
- [Laurence] One of the longest
and most expensive manhunts in US history is finally over,
but the quest to fully understand the Unabomber
carries on.
- [Sami] So what exactly were the Unabomber's motives?
Was this person just evil?
Were they somebody that was just insane?
- Look, Ted Kaczynski could've gotten away with this
for years longer than he did,
and it was really his wanting that attention
and wanting that recognition,
and getting that manifesto published
that led to his arrest.
- In January of 1998, Ted Kaczynski pleads guilty,
and is moved to an isolated cell in a Supermax prison
in Colorado, where he dies by suicide in 2023.
David Kaczynski, long torn by his decision
to turn in his own brother, collects the $1 million reward,
but turns it over
to the families of his brother's victims.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching this Case Closed episode
of History's Greatest Mysteries.
[suspenseful music]