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Born in Chicago in 1942, son of a Polish sausagemaker, Kaczynski was standout smart from childhood. His 89-year-old aunt told the Daily Southtown newspaper in Chicago that his parents were so intent on their son's academic success that they turned him
into a "snob." Wanda would take her Theodore to Chicago art museums when he was a baby hoping to stimulate his intellect. "I used to tell her," the aunt said, "'Wanda, the boy is too young. He isn't learning anything.' Later she w
ould tell me [when he was doing well in school], 'You see? He was listening.'"
He sprinted through high school in suburban Evergreen Park, not bothering with his junior year, and made only passing gestures at social contact. He did join the band for two years (he played the trombone) and the Coin Club, Biology Club, German Club a
nd the Math Club, but he never stayed long and did not strike his classmates as weird or worrisome--unlike another student who wound up in jail. He did have one notable hobby, though: "I remember Ted had the know-how of putting together things like b
atteries, wire leads, potassium nitrate and whatever and creating explosions," recalls his boyhood friend Dale Eickelman, now a Dartmouth professor. The boys detonated explosives in fields or in a metal garbage can, using ingredients they could scro
unge around the house or buy at the hardware store.
Off to Harvard at 16, Kaczynski managed to share a suite in preppy Eliot House with five fellow students without making much of an impression on any of them. "We had no interaction," says Michael Rohr, a philosophy professor at Rutgers. "
;I can't remember having a conversation with him." But N-43 was a strange suite, cobbled together out of converted servants' quarters in "the low-rent wing of Eliot House," as one roommate called it. The long corridor, with bedrooms branchi
ng off it, was where the college consigned its lone wolves. "We didn't choose to room together," Rohr says. "I was assigned to a suite of people without roommates. They were mostly loners. One of my suite mates, as I recall, seemed more int
erested in insects than people."
"Ted had a special talent for avoiding relationships by moving quickly past groups of people and slamming the door behind him," says Patrick McIntosh, another of the suite mates. Kaczynski's room was a swamp; the others finally called in the
housemaster, the legendary Master of Eliot House John Finley, who was aghast. "I swear it was one or two feet deep in trash," McIntosh says. "It had an odor to it. Underneath it all were what smelled like unused cartons of milk."
Kaczynski had finished with Harvard by the time he was 20 and headed off into the cauldron of '60s campus radicalism, first at the University of Michigan, where he got his master's and Ph.D., then to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach. At
Michigan he could be considered a rebel only because he wore a jacket and tie at just the moment when that was no longer done.
Like just about everything else during the antiwar years, mathematics had become politicized at Michigan, and Kaczynski's thesis adviser was among those who signed a manifesto urging peers to shun military contractors. Yet no one, either at Michigan or
Berkeley, remembers Ted's having any contact with the leftists he would later excoriate in his manifesto. "He did not go out of his way to make social contact," recalls his professor Peter Duren. "But he didn't strike me as being pathologi
cal. People in math are sometimes a bit strange. It goes with creativity." Despite almost five years' residency at the University of Michigan, he left no pictures, no yearbook entries--not even in 1964, when he got his master's degree, nor in 1967, w
hen he received his Ph.D.
At Berkeley, as an assistant professor on a tenure track at the world's premier math department, Kaczynski seems to have lost his way. Again the radical politics of the antiwar movement were "in your face," recalls Robert Wold, 45, a Berkeley
graduate from those years. "You had to choose. You were either part of it or you were against it." Again Ted hid in plain sight--no friends, no allies, no networking. When he suddenly resigned after teaching for two years, the department chair,
John W. Addison Jr., tried and failed to talk him into staying. Not that dropping out was such a surprising move in that era. "It was not uncommon," recalls Addison, now professor emeritus of mathematics. "One of my advisees went and lived
on a farm and did carpentry."
In 1971 Kaczynski set off for Montana, buying land and building his house and living on what he could grow or kill. He did odd jobs now and then but apparently got by on a few hundred dollars a year, with plenty of free time for his growing vocation: t
he disruption of the industrial society he had left behind. A fellow bank customer claims Kaczynski had some assets, yet six weeks ago he applied for a checkout clerk's job at Blackfoot market, which now sports a sign reading NO MEDIA, NO PRESS. Sherry Wo
od, the Lincoln librarian, is equally tight-lipped, though one of the library's unpaid volunteers has described his reading habits to the press. "I would go to jail before disclosing anything about my people," says Wood, who has nevertheless bee
n grilled for several days by the FBI. She has also been offered bribes to talk about Kaczynski, but will publicly say only, "I like him."
On April 17 a federal grand jury will begin meeting in Great Falls to consider explosives charges against Kaczynski. If he is eventually charged for the Unabomber's spree, the case could be moved to San Francisco or some other jurisdiction where bombin
gs occurred. Police and prosecutors from California to New Jersey are watching the mounting evidence and deciding whether to argue for the right to try him in their states. In the meantime, the investigators' job is not just to prove that Kaczynski looks,
talks, walks and thinks like the Unabomber, but to show that he is the Unabomber. That means showing that he was in the right place at the right time to have concocted and delivered the bombs, that he never had an alibi, that he was never in jail or a me
ntal hospital when a bombing occurred.
Already they have run down some bus tickets for trips out of Helena and identified the hotel he frequented there. Other agents last week were scouring hotels in Berkeley and Sacramento, California, showing clerks pictures of their suspect, hoping to pl
ace him in the city at the time when bombs were postmarked there. One of two typewriters found in the shack appears to match the one that produced the manifesto and will be subjected to comprehensive tests; the dna from saliva found on the stamps may be c
ompared to Kaczynski's. The most daunting task, and one that may never be complete, is to determine how he chose his victims--how, in his omnivorous reading of magazines, newspapers, journals and academic texts, particular names caught his attention and s
parked his rage.
But Thursday night, dozens of FBI agents celebrated at the Seven-Up Guest Ranch a few miles from Lincoln--which has become their temporary headquarters. They are sure they have their man. They believe they have not only stopped an 18-year crime spree b
ut also bagged an exceptional specimen: the brilliant sociopath who made himself virtually invisible. Says Ken Thompson: "The boys in the basement at Quantico are going to spend years studying this case."
--Reported by Sam Allis/Cambridge, Wendy Cole/Chicago, Pat Dawson/Lincoln, David S. Jackson/San Francisco and Elaine Shannon/Washington
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